Down to Sleep immerses language in praise, as the voice of Scott Owens builds a symphony of creations unique among contemporary poets. Down to Sleep ebbs and edges dream and reality in a joyful awakening. Every poem makes me feel like a child again, even as age swings on dove wings settling on broken blades of grass.
— Shelby Stephenson, Poet Laureate of North Carolina
After a writer reaches an elevated level of technical and artistic proficiency, the next goal should be to shape an artifact that absolutely no one else could have produced. In this stunning, nightmarish collection of narrative poems, Owens has done just that. Down to Sleep is guaranteed to both enlighten and haunt its readers.
–Tim Peeler, Author of Rough Beast
These poems are sharp-edged, cutting through the dust and worn grooves of our everyday routines with dynamism and humanity. Like a script for a rainbow, these lines constantly teeter between the poet’s waking life and his dream state, the twilight imagination that informs our best creative impulses, and reminds us that we are not prisoners of our personal histories, but hopeful beings that lay down at night inside skins that need shedding. In some ways, this collection is an artifact for a phantom, a manual hard-wired to reality, that tethers its creator to solid ground, even as he finds himself in the constant act of disappearing. There is a scene in Hitchcock’s 1951 film, Strangers on a Train, in which Robert Walker pops a child’s balloon at a fair with his cigarette. These poems operate in just the opposite manner, locating the toxic nature and nightmares of this broken life, turning the black smoke into balloons.
–Keith Flynn, editor of The Asheville Poetry Review,
and author of Colony Collapse Disorder