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