Poems of aching tenderness. PATERNITY explores with a discerning, clear-eyed sensitivity the daily
small delights, frustrations, and purely unexpected miracles that, taken
together, make up the building blocks of one father's personal salvation.
--Joanna Catherine Scott, author of Night
Huntress and Fainting at the Uffizi
In Scott Owens' lovely book of poems, PATERNITY, we have a remarkable account
of how his very special relationship with his young daughter, Sawyer, has
saved him from the darkness of his own childhood. The poems are engaging
in the deepest sense--funny, touching, and full of the kind of wisdom we
all need as parents and family members to sustain the balance of daily
life. How can anyone resist a girl who makes up the word, "effluctress,"
to describe what only a four-year old can see.
--Anthony S. Abbott, author of The Man
Who.
I’ve never been this strong before/ can only hope
I’ll hold this joy, writes Scott Owens in “Naming.” Poem
by poem, Paternity builds a father’s world—its
fears and joys, its vows, which are too often and too easily broken. Looming
over the lives of his children is the childhood of the man who speaks these
poems, memories which make the poet grateful for the days I am not
my father. It is this ability to feel the weight of the past on his
present life and the work of resisting that past even as he builds the
present his children live in that makes Paternity a book
that should be read not only by parents but by anyone interested in poems
that can disturb and console in the same breath.
--Al Maginnes, author of Ghost Alphabet