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This article appears in print in the April 2018 issue. Click here to subscribe.

“It’s moving, but you can’t predict where it’s going to be next,” said poet Eileen Myles in a 2012 interview, reflecting on why Seattle’s Wave Books chose the perfect name.

 

The poetry press launched in 2005, morphing out of the former Massachusetts-based Verse Press, and soon became known for two hallmarks: a concentration on mid- and late-career poets (Myles, for example, who left her previous publisher to join Wave) and type-centric design. The imprint achieved its highest accolade a year ago, as Olio, the second collection by New York poet Tyehimba Jess, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Wave is celebrating National Poetry Month with four new titles. One striking example, Orlando by Sandra Simonds—a Florida poet being published by Wave for the first time—is a love/hate letter to the city, quintessentially American in so many ways: “a dented taxi rushes off/into the palm tree afternoon, dented sun, dented hotels, shiny and sad remote/as money…A species of Disney not yet named, don’t say it’s over, Orlando, for I’m beginning/to forget why I loved you in the first place…”