Other Edens Volume 33

Ash Bowen taught creative writing at a number of universities, including the University of Alabama, Minot State University, and, most recently, Arkansas State University–Queretaro, Mexico. He has been the recipient of a Mona Van Dyun Scholarship from Sewanee Writers' Conference, and his work has appeared in New England Review, Kenyon Review Online, Rust Moth, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net. His first book of poetry, The Even Years of Marriage, was winner of the Orphic Prize.

"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"The poems of Ash Bowen's Other Edens are, improbably, both elegiac and hopeful. They might map the mournful footsteps of one who's departed paradise in a fallen state, but they also embody a beautiful, stubborn urge to find again 'the lost continent / of heaven.' And their spirit is indomitable. Formally deft and formally mischievous at once, these poems dare to make new worlds—worlds in which transgression in the name of love is as sweet as it's always been."—Dan Albergotti, author of Candy"The titles of some of the poems in Ash Bowen's Other Edens suggest the weird ephemera of the latest headlines ("Doctors Find Four Bees Living in Patient's Eye") or the anachronistic landscapes of the American West ("Six Horses Outside a K Mart [1980]") or the improvised paradise of a secular religion ("What I Tell the Mormons When They Ask What I Think About Heaven"). But the grave undercurrent in this book concerns the abuse and depression that connect childhood with adulthood, starkly highlighting marriage and parenthood as well. Loss here is so deeply felt that it ranges as freely and authentically into the mythic and the prelapsarian as it does into the contemporary and the colloquial, encompassing not only suicide but also the retreat of childhood imagination in the face of adult realism."—Karl Kirchwey, author of Stumbling Blocks: Roman Poems and The Happiness of This World: Poetry and Prose"Other Edens is a sacred and profane book of hard-won wisdom. These poems are not the fruit of the tree of good and evil—though there is good and evil in these pages—but the fruit of experience. Love is lost, and lost again, and regained. The poems are visceral and exacting, with the vernacular slipping into the oracular, and God and science intertwining. An almost mythic narrative emerges: early years of scarcity and violence, marriages lost to illness and adultery, and the persistence of love amid the midlife threat of mortality. Bowen's is an unsparing voice, and the reader is honored by his honesty and the grace of his artistry."—Dan O'Brien, author of Survivor's Notebook