Just started reading this incredible anthology of Northwest writing, The Rendezvous Reader (mad props to my girl Emily for passing it on). The Rendezvous is a little bar downtown that has some regular performances (the day Star Wars: Episode II came out, they wittily screened the Turkish version of Episode IV, which was not only dubbed but included actually included re-shot performances for some of the main characters, whose flesh, I suppose, was originally too pret-a-aimer).

But the Reader of the same name comes from a reading series they did a few years back, of then-local writers. The first story is like nothing I've ever read: raw in texture, subtly observed, cold of the world and warm of its people, weird, haunting, and skillfully balanced. There are three very different and quite good poems by one Marjorie Hogan (not the namesake, I hope, of Villa Marjorie) and lots more to be read. Every story in here seems to start with something abrasively engaging, like

WHEN I WAS BORN, I had a crooked eye. It was my right eye.

(Rebecca Brown, "Learning to See")

The darling thing is edited, in part, by Rachel Kessler, who wrote those encouraging, nuanced food reviews for The Stranger before Min Liao so coarsely pushed her out, and it's published by 10th Ave E Publishing, which is also putting out the first volume of the epic poem by Grant Cogswell, scrappy good-old-boy of Capitol Hill. This little number is bound with rivets or some such thing. Mr. Cogswell first charmed me by running for city council last year, basing his entire platform on support for the monorail, and, when asked which character from the Wizard of Oz was he, answering "the flying monkeys."

Hell of town we live in.