Family Portrait with Scythe: Poems

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