Two prose-rich essays about Sarah Keliher's hometown of Tacoma, Washington. Myth, town history, and personal history weave together beautifully, forming a properly complex portrait of a place that people love to hate.

From the publisher: "Tacoma, Washington. Discarded logging country, second-class port country, once-upon-a-time gateway to the west. Two stories of this city. In the first, Keliher inherits a gun that fits her hand perfectly - the same gun her great-grandfather carried west to avenge his sister, dead of tuberculosis after her husband abandoned her, and that her grandfather kept oiled for decades waiting for a debt that eventually settled itself, badly, in front of a streetcar. In the second, a young bear wanders into a Tacoma bar sometime in the city's raw early years, gets his own beer mug, becomes a local point of pride, and comes to the kind of end this town's stories tend to come to. Dry, blunt, and humorous, about Grit City."

16 pages, half-letter size, letterpressed covers, comes with a handsome bookmark. Published by Black River (Esrum, Denmark), letterpress-printed in short runs and released without an ISBN as a deliberate political choice.