Winner of the 1992 Barnard New Women Poets award.

In this companion volume to their anthology Working Classics, Nicholas Coles and Peter Oresick present poems written in the 1980s and 1990s that address the nature and culture of nonindustrial work---white collar, domestic, clerical, technical, managerial, or professional. They cross lines of status, class, and gender and range from mopping floors to television news reporting, Wall Street brokerage, and raising children.

This bookish history of Seattle includes essays, history and personal stories from such literary luminaries as Frances McCue, Tom Robbins, Garth Stein, Rebecca Brown, Jonathan Evison, Tree Swenson, Jim Lynch, and Sonora Jha among many others. Timed with Seattle’s bid to become the second US city to receive the UNESCO designation as a City of Literature, this deeply textured anthology pays homage to the literary riches of Seattle. Strongly grounded in place, funny, moving, and illuminating, it lends itself both to a close reading and to casual browsing, as it tells the story of books, reading, writing, and publishing in one of the nation's most literary cities.