Being a book lover comes with the territory for booksellers. This may explain why so many booksellers are also writers. Of course, there's Ann Patchett (Parnassus Books) and Garrison Keillor (Common Good Books) as well as Emma Straub (BookCourt) and Catherine Linka (Flintridge Book Store). And you can also count John Duvernoy, a bookseller at the Elliott Bay Book Co., among them. June marks the publication of Duvernoy's debut poetry collection, Something in the Way // Obstruction Blues ($15, Horse Less Press).
The poems in Blues are rhythmic and sharp yet magnificently oblique incantations to places and persons lost in the cascade of time. From the very beginning, Duvernoy takes us somewhere new, bizarre, dazzling and disorienting: "It was my first six months in Heaven and I hadn't really settled in yet," he writes in the opening poem, "As Is." Each subsequent verse gathers into a storm of earnest desire, intimacy transposed into a near-telepathic music, but this seemingly boundless craving is smartly hemmed in by his solid sense of diction. In "from 'Wisteria, Magnolia' " he commands, "Hand me my writing blindfold/ Now necklace/ Of incipient tongues." Sight and voice obstructed, he can then cultivate extrasensory desire--to know and be known in spite of obstacles inherent to body, time, space, language and other common, faulty vehicles.
On the sales floor, you get a different John Duvernoy, though. His approach is far more humble than the renegade on the pages of Blues. Still, it's clear to those of us who have sold books alongside him, or anyone who ever receives his recommendations, that he strives to understand a person's needs and wants for their next book. Booksellers everywhere will tell you they're preoccupied with desire: loving books will do that to a person. And Duvernoy has managed to shape the many faces of desire into one outstanding collection of poetry. --Dave Wheeler, publishing assistant, Shelf Awareness