Portable Kisses - Paperback

by Tess Gallagher (Author)

'Ideally, a reader should finish this book, then find someone to kiss' - Tess Gallagher.

'This is the best book of love poems since Neruda's' - Bill Knott.

'There are as many nuances and inflections for kisses as there are lips to kiss, ' says American poet Tess Gallagher. And so with these playful, serious and sassy poems about kisses, a whole book devoted to the kiss.

Portable Kisses is a book which kept growing. The earliest poems were published in a hand-printed limited edition called Portable Kisses in 1978. But the poems wouldn't stop, like the best of kisses, and Tess Gallagher published a new Portable Kisses in 1992, followed two years later by Portable Kisses Expanded. This first UK edition of the most travelled kisses in poetry since Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair includes all the kisses Tess Gallagher has put down on paper.

'In Portable Kisses, she convincingly provides condensed librettos of lovers' patterns of approach and retreat... It's a book filled with beauty, energy and surprise' - Ann Beattie.

Author Biography

Tess Gallagher was born in Port Angeles, Washington, the daughter of a logger and longshoreman. A poet, essayist, fiction writer and playwright, she has published many books, including five poetry titles in Britain with Bloodaxe: My Black Horse: New & Selected Poems (1995), Portable Kisses (1996), Dear Ghosts, (2007), Midnight Lantern: New & Selected Poems (2012) and Is, Is Not (2019). She has published three collections of stories, The Lover of Horses (1986), At the Owl Woman Saloon (1997) and The Man from Kinvara: Selected Stories (2009), plus two books of essays, A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry (1986) and Soul Barnacles: Ten More Years with Ray (2000). She co-authored two screenplays with Raymond Carver, and later contributed to the making of the Robert Altman film Short Cuts, based on Carver's work. She has also written introductions to books such as A New Path to the Waterfall and All of Us by Raymond Carver and Carver Country. She collaborated with the Irish storyteller Josie Gray to set his stories into print in Barnacle Soup (Blackstaff, 2007). In 2013 she hosted a Raymond Carver Festival on the Olympic Peninsula where she lived with her late husband until his death in 1988. She spends part of each year in the West of Ireland, near Sligo.