In Sad Man Happy Hour, Portland poet Aileen Keown Vaux places the lighthearted and pedestrian alongside the bleak and profound: a plate of sizzling hashbrowns paired with nuclear proliferation; holding hands with someone while watching the Earth burn. In an unapologetic collection set largely against the roiling ocean, dusty high desert and dense Northwestern forests, little deaths lurk everywhere, from parents flushing goldfish down the drain to children showing off wild animal carcasses. Despite wildfires, tsunamis, pandemics and failed relationships, Keown Vaux offers us hope, a quest for redemption and a life truly lived. We trust their poetic voice, which urges us to keep trying.
High Country News spoke with Keown Vaux about the state fairs, precocious children and looming volcanos that influenced Sad Man Happy Hour.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
High Country News: In the book’s acknowledgements, you state, “I am indebted to the Pacific Northwest, a place that inspires me to write as expansively as the land.” Tell us about this and what it means to write “expansively.”
Aileen Keown Vaux: I am from Washington but moved around the Pacific Northwest with my family before we made Yakima our home. Yakima is a particular preoccupation for me. It’s the reason this book exists — the first section, inspired by Central Washington State Fair themes, helped me find my writing voice, a tone that balances the sincere with the absurd. A lot of my writing is based around honoring and interrogating the place I come from.
I try not to be only one thing. When we talk about expansiveness, this region teaches me how to appreciate diversity. I translate this almost as a one-to-one to my personal identity. The scale and variety of the Pacific Northwest landscape astound me. We’re near bays, we’re near oceans, we’re influenced by pine trees. In Yakima, there’s the desert landscape, there’s the wheat fields of Walla Walla and the Palouse from Pullman up through Spokane. Then you drive through the Columbia Gorge, astounded by the sense of time and the cataclysmic experience that carved that feature. I was really disoriented when I lived in the Midwest; it wasn’t until I came back here that I was like, oh, I need volcanoes to look at to understand where I’m at.
HCN: Do you consider these to be persona poems, where you as the poet speak as other characters? How much is direct lived experience versus imagination?
AKV: I don’t think I would classify them as persona in the sense of representing a type of human. It’s more accessing flashpoints of interest and then allowing my mind to follow its own through-thread. One of the sneaky pleasures of poetry is that you can start with a kernel of truth, but you don’t have to stay faithful to it. I think I gravitate to poetry because there’s so much structure, yet so many opportunities to break it.
HCN: If you have a grounding structure — a container, a logic — the poems can amoeba inside that.
AKV: Yeah, it’s 700 raccoons in a trenchcoat.
HCN: Clown car!
AKV: Exactly.
HCN: Let’s talk about the dark humor you use.
AKV: It’s harder for people to accept challenging topics if they’re not sort of Trojan-horsed into something a little funny, so that’s how I like to approach my work. When I read (in public), I’m jocular, kind of like, “Whoop, whoop! We’re just having a good time.” It gets delivered in a way that feels much lighter than when you’re reading them (yourself). Up in Shelton, Washington, I just read the poem “Trust Fall” about the co-worker flushing her kid’s goldfish down the toilet. People were chuckling, and because I’d never read that poem out loud. I was like, “Oh, man, you guys are sick! This is not funny.” So it worked.
Sad Man Happy Hour
Aileen Keown Vaux
110 pages, softcover: $18.95
Unsolicited Press, 2026.
If death is showing up a lot [here], it’s because I’m observing it, and it feels as vital and vibrant to me as life-living. I think there’s something categorically different about living within eyesight of Mount St. Helens, having these giant peaks where you’re like, “I’m not in charge here. I could go at any second.” I don’t think it’s good to hold that inside, so this is probably one of my artistic tics, getting it out of my body and asking, “Are you guys thinking about this, too?”
What I started to do unconsciously turned into a conscious practice of thinking about what laughter does to us physiologically in the face of needing to survive things that feel impossible. I read a book about people who work in morgues or who do things like alpine rescue, and the use of gallows humor — there’s a physiological response that’s happening with your vasovagal nervous system. If I’m going to talk about death, it better be funny.
HCN: Tell us about the kids the speaker interacts with in “Boa Constrictors are Addicted to Hugs.” They say some incredible things. Did they really show you a bunch of animal carcasses?
AKV: I think kids approach me because they’re like, “I don’t totally know, but I think you’re willing to hear me out on this.” And I’m like, “You got it right, Daniel! I will listen to you say, ‘Hey, guess what! Boa constrictors are addicted to hugs.’” Then they asked, “Do you wanna tour everything dead in the yard?”
I do! And we did! My friends have this backyard that’s sort of wild, and we looked at everything that had died there. It wasn’t scary or upsetting; it was fascinating. Kids need to process that, and so do adults. I’m not afraid of being at that precipice with people.
“We need a reminder that we should not lose our humanity when we think we are losing our world.”
HCN: This book provides advice on how to deal with, essentially, the end of the world. We’re presented with tragedies, large and small. The attitude is, yes, this is brutal, but, as you write in “Zero Gravity”: “still, I plan; / a garden plot rented for the summer / where my seeds will grow.” There are wonderful examples of continuing to live in the face of it all; despite global warming, the folks in “Fair Fever, Catch It!” carve butter sculptures and watch calves be born.
AKV: I’m aware of the ways in which we’re not doing great right now. but I hold out hope for the next phases. We need a reminder that we should not lose our humanity when we think we are losing our world.
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This article appeared in the November 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Advice for a fractured world.”
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