Overview

James Owens' stunning valediction, both for and forbidding mourning, slices with steely memory to the ""wet bone."" Stumbling with a boy's ""ignorant gravity,"" Owens cannot right the ""unbalanced accounts"" of his miner father's sooty lungs, his parents' exhausted marriage--nor his own professed failings. Yet his keen eye in and of the natural world does lead to the scales balanced, if precariously--in belonging ""on the brief earth,"" in parsing spring from grief, in ""the good story of the body"" whose light becomes ""the shine of spirit."" A master poet works this crescent blade, a master who embraces life's whole catastrophe as equally as he farewells it past. --Linda Parsons, author of This Shaky Earth

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9781947504202

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I've long been drawn to poets whose works--defined by precision, by transcendence--create moments of intense possibility in uncovering the exquisite nature of the ordinary. James Owens is one of them. His writing deftly mingles all lyrical and narrative threads into bursts of vision, beauty, clarity--wholly remarkable and singular. Owens is a poet who carries, in the words of Alan Tate, the secret wisdom around the world --placing his work firmly in the lineage of Virgil to Donne to Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Celan, Charles Wright, Kathryn Stripling Byer. In Family Portrait with Scythe, his latest book, Owens writes of relationships and place--in striking blends of Appalachia, northern Indiana, Ontario, in a scattering of histories--with a fixated need for all truths hidden in the land --its deep veins of coal and death, its skies full of silent birds, its riverbanks always revealing something new. The voices in these poems are convincing, familiar, and thoroughly bent to mission: I walked on, heavy, and carried this only world (from Last Thoughts Cooling Like an Abandoned Cup ). Their stories compel the poet and stir the reader, as in the stunning Imagine a Woman Behind Razor Wire you must tell it speak it write it. This collection may unsettle your ease, but that's what it was meant to do. --Sam Rasnake

Author Information

James Owens grew up in the coal-mining country of Appalachian Virginia, attended King College, and worked as a reporter and editor on newspapers in the region, before studying poetry at the University of Alabama and receiving an MFA in 2002. He now lives with his wife in a small town in Ontario, along the north shore of Lake Huron, where the winters are long enough to make the summers precious. He has three children and two step-children, all grown, and spends as much time as he can in the woods and near the water. Of his writing, he comments, ""I try to negotiate a balance between the ecstatic possibilities of language and nature and the hard-edged boundaries of the moment."" He has published widely, including three previous books of poems: An Hour is the Doorway (2007), Frost Lights a Thin Flame (2007), and Mortalia (2015).

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