Cover Art by Sarah J. Sloat / Cover Design by David Wojciechowski
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Happy EverythingThe urge to create beauty and be beautiful haunts Happy Everything, Caitlin Cowan's powerful celebration of feminine resilience. The materiality of marriage and divorce abound in the postnuptial ghost stories Cowan tells with no-nonsense, Midwestern frankness and the intimacy of an afterparty conversation in a corner booth. Happy Everything is a deranged wedding registry of various poetic forms which highlight the perverse tenacity of ancestral traumas and the paradoxes inherent to women's relationships with men. These poems are a collage of traditions from a past that women are continually attempting to escape.
Published by Cornerstone Press for the Portage Poetry Series in February 2024. Read the title poem here. Order your copyWriting a review?Digital ARCS available and limited review copies available. Please feel free to reach out if you're seeing resources!
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Praise.
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Cowan subverts what we think we know about marriage and divorce and the traumas of childhood in a witty, heartbreaking voice all her own… This is a terrific debut!
—Denise Duhamel author of Second Story Caitlin Cowan’s debut collection is a celebration against obligation, an origin story of gendered half-truths, and an entreaty towards reclamation, that we may be the “unruly golden dog” of our own damn stories. Pulsing with a deft balance of wisdom and righteous rage, the masterful, lyrical, and gut-punching poems of Happy Everything look the staid picture of domestic “happiness” square in the face and say, for all our sakes, “not good enough.” —Jenny Molberg author of The Court of No Record |