Everything Turns On A Delicate Measure by Maureen Owen

A keen awareness of the world, the lucidity of self-awareness, a textual energy whose propulsion melts line-breaks, a diction that teeters on illogic and yet creates their own sense, and a unique privacy from a poet’s deep meditations all combine to create a deceptive alchemy in Maureen Owen’s Everything Turns On A Delicate Measure. Such alchemy effects resonant and provocative lines that make the poems memorable, from “that grimace of the sky” and “that earth burps” and everything in between such as “the shadow of the ant moves at exactly the same speed as the ant.” Marveling, you voluntarily inhabit these poems until “at home you speak in tongues."

—Eileen R. Tabios, author of Because I Love You, I Become War

What is the restless energized measure for an expanding universe? Maureen Owen is one of our most exploratory poet inventors whose sound and sense insure what’s hidden from view gets more mysterious. Always terrific juxtapositions of word-koans and settings — in relation, smart, original. Wonderment of Nature and flawed humanness of phenomenal world lock horns and dance. Odd transitions and layering impacts the dynamic glow of Neolithic Lalita, goddess of play whose eyes stay moist with compassion. It's been my pleasure to follow Maureen Owen’s amazing trajectory in our entangled lifetimes, for her measured gnosis, wild head space, craft, beauty and wit. This book is a reason to celebrate and continue.

—Anne Waldman

Everything Turns on a Delicate Measure nails it exactly. I’ve known Maureen Owen’s poems since 1970 and have come to expect her vividness to become words, and vice versa. There will be the paradox of open-ended containment. A chanson of feeling, sensorium and solitudinous spiritual concern presented wittily and unsparingly in tangential, fluid collage — call it “not pastiche.” A quietly intense pagan attention to a pastoral, not urban, space of four dimensions. Multiple sensory observations complicated by simultaneity, and imagination, not grammar, will fuel the density of her words. At her most direct there will be passionate loopholes I’d call perceptions. Two poems, “What We Do” and “Washing Chard,” take eco-contrition to a sublime level that exceeds even my high expectations. Maureen doesn’t just have skill sets, she has abundant gifts, and in this collection her gifts continue to mature. Five stars won’t do; I give it unlimited stars.

—John Godfrey

In Everything Turns on a Delicate Measure, Owen scans the densely variegated material world, alert to its entangled particles. From bush crickets and pink roses, to the hippocampus posing like a boudoir diva, to the whoosh of a dress, or a frigate’s moan, the lyric cascades in a dynamic confluence: “at night I go to bed with everything I’m thinking.” Through Owen’s signature caesuras and wild jagged titles, such poetics of attention sound their “human whistle” and trace our existential passage on this earth, saying, yes, we were here.

—Chris Tysh

Maureen Owen is the former editor and chief of Telephone Magazine and Telephone Books, currently celebrated in a two vol. recap by The Poetry Collection at The University of Buffalo.
Her latest title is let the heart hold down the breakage Or the caregiver's log from Hanging Loose Press. Another recent publication is Poets on the Road with Barbara Henning, a collaborative reading tour blog in print from City Point Press. Other books include Edges of Water from Chax Press and Erosion's Pull, a Coffee House Press title that was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award and the Balcones Poetry Prize. Her collection American Rush: Selected Poems was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and her work AE (Amelia Earhart) was a recipient of the prestigious Before Columbus American Book Award. She has taught at Naropa University, both on campus and in the low-residency MFA Creative Writing Program, and served as editor-in-chief of Naropa’s on-line zine not enough night. She can be found reading her work on the PennSound website.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 82 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-450-5