Delaware Memoranda by Richard Owens

Delaware Memoranda is a lush crosscurrent marked by history’s flicker and memory’s flame. In these buoyant illuminations, language’s intricate shadows and solids reveal and carve at transformations in etymology to create a dialogic swerve that is the person, that is the conversation, that can neither be nor step in the same river twice. This book is tougher than any blurb.

—Kyle Schlesinger

Whitman, in the first epigraph: “the river affords nutriment of a higher order”… Indeed, the figure of a river runs all through Delaware Memoranda , and the book’s haunted, tough, gorgeously lined mineral language gleams and tumbles along the cuts, eddies, and runs of its sinuous thought. This is strange, powerful, singular work, and the “nutriments” its documentary richness offers are enough to last a long, long time. With this book, Owens fully joins a special company of historically intent poets—Ed Dorn, Amiri Baraka , Susan Howe , Carl Thayler, Dale Smith, for instance—who, like Olson and Williams before them, have insistently sought to bear forth, from neglected materials, those “higher orders” (obscured but persisting) in the ravaged American flow.

—Kent Johnson

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BIO: Born Perth Amboy General Hospital, New Jersey in 1973. Dislocated at Sussex County Vocational Technical School and William Paterson College. US Army 1997 – 2001 (medic). Assigned three and one half years to post in Waegwan, south Korea, with intervening trips to Hong Kong, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and brief jump to visit Cid Corman in Kyoto. Unemployment and odd industrial jobs. Further dislocated at Carmela Soprano’s alma mater Montclair State University. Farmworker advocate in black dirt region of Orange County, New York. Presently relocating through the University at Buffalo. Poetry, essays and reviews variously published online and in little magazines. Editor: Punch Press and Damn the Caesars.