Portable Kisses

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 four poetry titles in Britain with Bloodaxe: My Black Horse: New & Selected Poems (1995), Portable Kisses (1996), Dear Ghosts, (2007) and Midnight Lantern: New & Selected Poems (2012), to be followed by Is, Is Not in 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). She currently lectures for the Whidby Island Writers Workshop MFA in Washington State during the Winter term. In May 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.

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.