UNT Press

About Bowen's Other Edens

Other Edens captures the heartache that arises from hope’s repeated failures. While the book’s poems have occasional formal leanings, they serve as attempts to bring structure to the chaos of the world, but even those attempts prove to be ragged and imperfect, as if nothing—not even poetry—can escape the contemporary world’s ruinous touch. The poems explore how grief (re)shapes belief and how death (re)shapes memory. Readers of Frank Stanford’s poetry might find a kinship between his and Bowen’s depictions of menace in the world, particularly in the rural South, where violence patiently waits to be useful to someone. Bowen’s poems are stark and terse, eschewing any poetic impulses to repaint the world as anything but a demoralizing series of crushing disappointments.

“What is outside the garden of Eden? Genesis tells us it’s the sweat of our labor on a hard and hot land full of weeds and thorns. But what if, as Ash Bowen’s title wonders, there are Other Edens? This is poetry akin to Johnny Cash and Buddy Moss, Tom Waits and Jason Isbell—ruin songs of the hard-luck and every kind of hurt, the ones whom hope seems to have abandoned—out of which a keen and human voice calls into the dark. It found my heart. It will find yours too.”—Philip Metres, judge and author of Fugitive/Refuge