Poems by Richard Owens

From Delaware Memoranda (2008) through Dead in the House of Pound (2018), this volume brings together a broad constellation of poetic work, much of which first appeared through presses on both sides of the Atlantic in editions either out-of-print or distantly circulated. In drawing this work together, the contiguous interests—formal and otherwise—that have compelled this labor are rendered sharper, more legible, and more readily apparent despite the passage of this work from earlier appearances in other social and intellectual contexts.

DELAWARE MEMORANDA:
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

BALLADS:
Owens wants his poems to bear the wounds of contemporary economic and political crises, and to reflect the remediation by which romantic cultural elites produced a thing they called the “poetry of the folk.” —Andrew Peart, Chicago Review

NO CLASS:
Next to the best American agit-poetry today, from the West Coast academic-occupation sensibility of Juliana Spahr and Joshua Clover to the laureled protest songs of Claudia Rankine, Owens’ work is downright dirty and salty like the Northeast where it was written. —Lukas Moe, Social Text

Book Information:

· Paperback: 382 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-355-3

$20

Poems by Richard Owens Book… by BlazeVOX [books]