Boulder poetry bookstore only the third of its kind in the US

ColoradoDaily reports on the opening of a new bookstore in Boulder where poetry alone occupies the shelves. Innisfree Poetry Bookstore and Cafe is only the third such bookstore in the country, following Open Books in Seattle, Washington and Grolier's in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

According to Publisher's Weekly, there are indeed only two other bookstores throughout the entire United States that devote their entire stock to poetry. Although there are other stores that have a great variety of poetry material, notably Beat haven City Lights in San Francisco, these stores also offer other selections. Barnes and Noble, for example, does sell poetry books, but their stock of the genre makes up only one percent of their overall offerings.

Innisfree's poet-owners, Brian Buckley who once worked at Grolier's himself, and his wife Kate Hunter hope that the bookstore and cafe will bring together poetry fans and writers from around Boulder and tourists alike. Though it doesn't officially open until January 15th (according to Hunter, "Like a poem, this shop is still editing itself. City codes and all the stuff you never hear about.") in the days since its soft opening in December, the store has already begun attracting regulars.

Together they want Innisfree to be more than merely a poetry bookstore and café, but also a meeting place for local poets and writers, people who are interested in discussing poetry and literature, or possibly simply finding a calm reprieve from the storm of daily life outside of Innisfree's 460 square feet.Hunter and Buckley took the name for their store from a poem written by William Butler Yeats. "Lake Isle of Innisfree" was a response to Henry David Thoreau's immortal "Walden." In Yeats' poem, Innisfree was his own special place to "get away from it all," his own Walden.