In TO, Scott Owens illustrates the joy, frustration, and oxymoronic nature of writing poetry. Only someone who is deeply committed to and believes in the art and craft of poetry could compile such a compelling collection of ars poetica. In fact, the titles alone compel: ‘The Sun Was Like an Oxymoron,’ ‘Arse Poetica,’ ‘On the Recent Reports of the Death of Poetry,’ and so on. This is poetry for the smart reader, the common reader, the reader who’s not sure if poetry is his or her thing but is willing to give it a shot. In To, Owens promises to sway all comers. Once I started reading this collection, I couldn’t put it down until the very end. — Robert Lee Brewer, author of Solving the World’s Problems and editor of Poet’s Market
Scott Owens’s TO is a masterful collection of poems on the subject of poetry, such that poetry as a genre acts as the singular ordering device for this most fascinating and valuable contribution to our understandings of the genre. Owens’s poems are replete with insight, humor, wisdom, compassion, irony, honesty, and an unassailable knowledge; Owens is both an experienced and very talented poet, both sides everywhere on display throughout TO. Buy this book, read it, and let anyone borrow it; each reader will enjoy, learn, profit, and grow––poetry fan or not, whether twenty or four times twenty. –Ronald Moran
Poetry, Scott Owens assures us, owes nothing to anyone. This claim is well substantiated by the poems in TO, where Owens uses such classic elements as line and stanza, image and rhyme to heighten language in ways that can’t be ignored or denied. Given even half a chance, these poems will carry their readers from whimsy to grief, from despair to delight. They will take readers forward and take them back, from the simple human need to be about to the business of making words do what they must, and thus, in making art, to mean. –Phebe Davidson