Dear Ghost,

Catherine Owen’s latest collection is an extended love letter to her poetic influences and to the real-world objects, people, places and situations that fascinate her. Inspired by the work of John Ashbery, among others, in Dear Ghost, Owen returns to the kooky imagery and humorous style she last visited with her award-winning collection Frenzy. These poems entertain immensities of sound while plumbing the depths of the psyche’s surrealities, content to enter a dreamlike realm where meaning is found in the nonsensical, the utterly human and the everyday. While Owen gathers her subjects from the mundane?work, sex, acquaintances and art?she imbues them with the extraordinary quirks and uncertainties that only language can create, and the effects are dizzying.

AUTHOR

Catherine Owen

Catherine Owen is an Edmonton-based poet (formerly of Vancouver) whose work has been published in national and international journals such as ‘Queen’s Quarterly’ and ‘Poetry Salzburg’. Her first book ‘Somatic: The Life and Work of Egon Schiele’ (Exile Editions, 1998) was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award while her second, ‘The Wrecks of Eden’ (Wolsak and Wynn, 2002) was short listed for the BC Book Prize. Her most recent collections are ‘Cusp/detritus’ (Anvil Press, 2006) and’Shall: Ghazals’ (Wolsak and Wynn, 2006). Her work has also appeared in the anthologies ‘A Practice of Spirit'(St Thomas Poetry Series 2002) and a collection of tributes to Joe Rosenblatt (Guernica Editions 2005).

Reviews

“Owen writes down to the bone, laying out plain and simple facts and leaving her readers to feel their way through the work. At times the subject matter seems starkly ordinary, yet there is a weight to the delivery that makes the poems seem much more momentous.” – Quill & Quire