The Cartographer’s Pencil

poems by

Joseph Powell

~88 pages, $15 (+ shipping)

Projected Release Date: September/October 2025

An Advance Sale Discount price of $9 (+ shipping) is available HERE prior to press time. This price is not available anywhere else or by check. The check price is $13.50/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412. 

PLEASE NOTE: Ordering in advance of the release date entitles the buyer to a discount. It does not mean the book will ship before the date posted above and the price only applies to copies ordered through the Main Street Rag Online Bookstore.

Joseph Powell has published eight previous collections of poetry, including Holding Nothing Back (Main Street Rag, 2019) and The Slow Subtraction: ALS (MoonPath press, 2019). His book of short stories, Fish Grooming & Other Stories, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. He co-wrote a book on poetic meter, Accent on Meter (NCTE, 2004). He won a National Endowment for the Arts Award (2009), an Artist Trust award (2005), the Tom Pier Award (2006), and twelve poems have been nominated for Pushcart prizes. He has been Central Washington University’s Phi Beta Kappa Scholar of the Year (2004), and was awarded Distinguished University Professor in Artistic Accomplishment (2009). He’s an emeritus CWU English professor. He lives in Ellensburg, WA.

With masterful metaphors, Joseph Powell’s The Cartographer’s Pencil sketches the contours of human and natural history in language as pleasing as it is precise. In poems that are elegiac, gently humorous, and unafraid of revealing human foibles, readers will encounter fresh ways of seeing ravens and toads, rivers and wind; local characters and explorers; art and American blue jeans. This book is as textured as a relief map, ambitious in its scope as it charts an unflinching yet compassionate vision. ~Lisa Norris, author of Women Who Sleep with Animals and Toy Guns

Joseph Powell renders the world’s tactile being in language so keen and vibrant, a casual reader might miss his sympathetic ethos, one that is always probing, always driven by curiosity, but informed by values that are simply humane. In volume after volume, his poems uncover subtleties so poignant that this reader feels buoyed by affirmation, even in their painful moments. The embrace of an octogenarian “spirit’s nurse” following a beloved one’s death (“The Broom Hug”), or of spreading trees that “feel the [vanished] salmon swimming inside them” (“The Language of Trees”) surprise us with the truth that “loss prefigures anything new” (“Play Beach”). The Cartographer’s Pencil maps new territory in a distinguished career. It is the work of a man given to the Beauty Way. ~Rob Schnelle, author of Shiver with Me Warmly and Valley Walking

UPSIDE-DOWN & FLYING

I walked our lane to get
the mail in wet November.
The news was full of disasters,
the fog tight as a hairnet.

Then a raven tucked and rolled
in the sparse yet snowy rain.
His wings flapped, flapped then folded
as he rolled and righted again.

A tree’s few leaves were buttons
on the shredded yellow season.
Ice lidded the eyes of potholes.
The bird was a black loophole

in the late light and his call—
a conceit both watery and crystal—
was the playful reversal
of a constricting universe.

He tucked and rolled the alpine
air seven times, like a line
of cursive that unfurled
across the wet-white world.

The bird overturned a day
that seemed bleak and bare
when he rolled a seven in his play
and made light of heavy air.

THE DEEP END OF WINTER

You think of all the life hunkered down
under the heavy lids of pond ice,
inside burrows and cavities,
how that crowded gymnasium of summer
had to disperse somewhere.

The old bird nests wear white hoods,
fenceposts, wind-blown mohawks.
Eagles and ravens in cottonwoods wait
for roadkill, afterbirth, voles moving under the snow.

Your breath is white and a heaviness
sits on your chest as if your lungs
don’t quite know how to breathe.

Your nostrils freeze, cheeks burn.
Each footstep feels old and slippage
is a constant, as if life were telling you
everything is tenuous, the future’s on skids,
and truth has no more purchase
than your sliding bootsoles, or any
conviction’s destination.

The driveway ice crimps the corners of the day,
slicks exits. The white cold enters everything.
Between piled ridges, the paths out narrow.

MID-JUNE WIND

Invisible presence, scourge of hats and hair,
a wave in air like sound feeling its way,
all movement rushes forward like river water,
currents threading through each other.
Any motion is already the past, branches leaning
after an impulse for flight, waving goodbye,
goodbye. The present is always a touch behind,
the future a flaccid space the wind can’t
go toward fast enough. The immobile blue
is all backdrop as flowerheads scatter
their petal propellors into the shivering grass.
Cones pellet the lawns and weak limbs
brittle and break. Birds sail one way then beat
wings back to find nests shaken or shattered.
Skunks drag their plumed tails like travois
over the corrugated fields, their backhairs
around their necks like an old Dutch ruff.
The weeds—knap-, gum-, horse-, milk-
—are aerated for stamina, escort the currents through,
a shook shagging, gravid spillage.
Even the wiregrass, tall because the cows dismiss it,
lean down and back, down and back, as if
their heads were typing their stories in the dirt.
Empty plastic bags breathe, can’t contain themselves,
tumble aerobatically skyward, or scrape
the ground, until they snag in trees,
the heads of ghosts, their silence trembling.
Flags fly, wrinkle and stretch, shiver stiff
against their brass eyes, pledging allegiances
to something unearthly, invisible as motion,
like the force of thinking, pushing things in its path,
surrounding and touching them, abstract and lucent as air,
as ideas, as the feather-touch of illusion,
and the things bent to its use, unbending in aftermath,
how each successive wave shakes new leaves
in new ways each time through.
Wigs and wiles, dodges and darts,
there is nowhere it can’t go, nothing it can’t lift
or set down again, nothing too small to inhabit,
and it goes and goes until it stops.