We are currently under construction on this site. Many more books will appear shortly.

The following site has some of the books not listed here but it is not exhaustive. We have more.

https://ellenreim.wixsite.com/website-2/books

Inquire at the top of this website if you are interested being a potential author of Goldfish Press Seattle. Send email to koonwoon@gmail.com

Goldfish Press Seattle

Magpie, a book of poems with illustrations by the very talented visual artist Jennifer Carrasco

Order on Amazon https://www.amazon.ca/Magpie-Jennifer-Carrasco/dp/1950276341

Mother and daughter heartfelt dialogue!

No Time Paperback – October 9, 2024

by Dean Brink (Author)

Brink’s book seems devoted to the dynamics of alienation and its ways of producing strange intimacies. Cold, confusing distance generates a fascinating aura of feeling with and feeling for the situations in these poems: as “Recent History” puts it, “Now we know each other through these inklings/ staining our thoughts with wonder.” The first poem, for example, establishes a speaker demanding care to avoid dangers in a walk. T he last line states as the purpose of such caution the ability to “enjoy the jaunt without a care.” Distance from one’s environment provides the key to a sense of freedom within it. “Marine Shadow: after Ashbery” proposes that “A sense of doom filled us with hope one mangrove at a time.” Brinks’ world seems to be a site in which herring “feed themselves to seals.” Compelling and disturbing accuracy demands efforts to come to terms with a totality that has no care for our efforts to construct it (Hegel be damned): trembling little fingers silencing cymbals sift melodies off shuffled notes never nameable, vertical, not to send you maybe a nudge—aperture loosening the long shot what we don’t know— closer then, though learning nothing, holding it. Boal said it and you decorated it never to get to it … I could not avoid the sense that in reading Brink we are engaging an Ashbery hardened by living in a new almost impenetrable America. There is the same ability to hear a language of feeling within or because of the poet’s distance, and, in the last and best poem in the volume, there is the unfolding of a prose mode of description that highlights the lyrical sensibility. That sensibility wants to embrace the affective energies in the states rendered as aspects of a struggle to take in the whole scene with a sanity-producing aura of amusement. More precisely, the poem is based on the problem of integrating past, present, and future by a speaker who ix cannot stop talking. Language proves marvelously effective at description, while being painfully ineffective at the work of making coherent wholes. Talking becomes the paradigm for being “here” and “not here” at the same time—a condition by which Brink seems to want to add a dramatic intensity to Ashbery’s mask of playful freedom. T hen the volume adds two brilliant diversions. “The Threepenny Space Opera” is a short sci-fi play based on Gay and Brecht but obsessed by what the body becomes in future conditions when medical science rules decision- making. The pain of identifying with the victims of this science, the beggars perhaps, becomes inseparable from the joy involved in identifying with the author’s inventiveness. Finally, there is a ten-minute play that begins in mockery of academic publishing and spreads to make ridiculous and yet necessary the voices that engage in shouting as their means of coping with domestic situations. This engagement comprises banal but ultimately painful discourse about the raising of children. This play ends with the cast singing their quarrels, not unlike what this reader felt by the conclusion of the book. —Charles Altieri

https://www.amazon.com/No-Time-Dean-Brink/dp/1950276309

These gripping books are available from Amazon.com

The Write-Age Writing Book

by Koon K Woon (Author)

This book may be described as a free-floating guide to evocative writing, based on the author’s award-winning poetics. You will hone your writing, prose or poetry, fiction or nonfiction to new heights. You will develop an acute sense of the feel of defamiliarization to bring the reader to literary landscapes that are both at once strange and familiar, but not ordinary. It is guaranteed that you will triple your literary skills in no time at all, as you make associative leaps to greater and greater heights of literary awareness and accomplishment. The author’s work has been used in the teaching of poetry and short fiction in some of our most outstanding universities. The author is in the ranks of internationally-anthologized poets.He holds nothing back from you.This is no formula-writing. Go forth to the frontiers as the author’s original work propels y

Jennifer 5.0 out of 5 stars A Beautiful Immersion into Nature, Fatherland, Sanctuary, and DesireReviewed in the United States on January 8, 2025Mary Anna’s poems are filled with an insatiable hunger…one for fatherland, for every burst of natural element…a longing of unresolved love, her unashamed walk on this planet. We feel her sanctuary and spirituality yet freedom to live and desire…and desire to be desired.   As we immerse in the poet’s words, it’s impossible not to contemplate our own transformations within the Church, among Mother Earth, and amidst our multicultural homes.

Contemplating sins of her past, Mary Anna asks,  
“Do I dip fingers  
in fonts now dry?  
Prostrate myself  
on the floor  
near where an altar  
once stood  
and confessional doors  
hang on rusty hinges?” 

As time has catapulted forward, Mary Anna lives in “a season of no years,” perhaps questioning the purpose of regret and choosing to focus on what’s before her—like lover’s passion that doesn’t fade with age, and observing the simplicity of marigolds and coneflowers, as she pays special homage to Michigan waterways, flora, and fauna.

As I read through this collection of poetry, I felt myself going backwards more often than I did forward, re-reading and lingering on every line. In a way, I feel like this mimics Mary Anna’s closeness with her past and present–diligently taking the opportunity to closely reflect on each moment gifted to her.