Böcker av Owen Lewis

Knock-knock! Who's there?Ultimately for all, it will be age. At first, it seems like a bad joke--needing a cane, memory loss, more care, forgetting even one's own name. In KNOCK-KNOCK, Lewis creates the persona of an older physician who should've known what's in store. Sometimes the reality is grim, but there's humor, love, and even romance in his inventive and poetic story-telling. "Lost-and-found / is not a planned / destination." Yet we all eventually find ourselves there."Old age is no joke. The body breaks down; the mind wanders away. For many, if not most, aging is existentially challenging and physically demeaning. And yet Owen Lewis' KNOCK-KNOCK finds a variety of entry points into this penultimate human experience. The eighteen poems (in the numerology of the Kabbalah, life) gathered here range from mild ruminations on the disconcerting experience of losing and forgetting inconsequential things, to more intense poems, exploring critical conditions: impaired ambulation, deterioration of vision, cardiac failures. Like all good healthcare providers, Lewis - a medical doctor, himself - is always writing toward the fear of mortality that lies at the heart of aging, and that frightens most of us, nearly to death. Through poetic storytelling, deep empathy, psychological courage, and a gimlet eye, he finds both solace and meaning (and yes: sometimes humor) in this phase of life."--Kate Daniels"KNOCK-KNOCK is a sophisticated chapbook about aging and the brain by a prize-winning poet and professor of psychiatry. The poems come to the reader in a variety of shapes, moods and sounds. The book opens with the speaker's tender first encounters with such age-related issues as the use of a cane for mobility and the occasional challenges of memory. Music is an important element (and subject) in the subsequent poems about more serious symptoms and the fears they inspire. Only a clinical expert in diseases of the mind could have constructed the drama of the scenes that follow."--Michael SalcmanPoetry.

Poetry. In this powerful sequence of poems, Owen Lewis bravely revisits the death of his younger brother in 1980, trying to make what sense he can of inexplicable loss. He summons his brother by 'taking every memory that [comes] to me like a hand in the dark, ' by listening attentively to what his brother's spirit might be saying from beyond the grave, and by speaking back to him and offering him a troubled but loving place in the poet's current life. Like the dune fences that make up one of the sequence's motifs, these poems are stays against confusion that, paradoxically, do not attempt to fully wall out that confusion but, instead, let it in: 'Enough slats / to keep things together, but still / some sand pours through.' The result is a poetry that is deeper and more moving, open both to pain and vision.--Jeffrey Harrison

A holistic, in-depth guide to understanding core strength. Clearly explains how the core works to manage and transfer the force of movement through the center of the body, building on principles of biotensegrity.

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Winner of a Distinguished Favorite Award in the 2020 New York City Big Book Awards. FIELD LIGHT, written as an extended, multi-sectioned poem that moves in and out of prose, is a personal and historical exploration of the Berkshires through poetry and prose. Physician-poet Owen Lewis becomes a figure in his own epic as he learns to see himself and the abounding history that lives in the towns of western Massachusetts. From the writers Hawthorne, Melville, nearby Stanley Kunitz, Chris Gilbert and others, to artists Daniel Chester French, his daughter Peggy Cresson and Norman Rockwell, from the young lawyer Theodor Sedgwick who undertook a trial in 1781 to free Elizabeth Mumbet ending slavery in Massachusetts, to civil rights champion W.E.B. Du Bois, to Arlo Guthrie, to physician Austen Riggs and his psychiatric hospital, to Gertrude Smith and the founding of Tanglewood, FIELD LIGHT investigates layered histories to create a compelling cultural, political and social narrative, with its cycles of privilege and racism, that continues to unfold. It is the story of finding one's voice amid many voices, and the importance of the community of voices.

Poetry. Owen Lewis's poems do us the huge favor of restoring a radical and essential strangeness to the so-called 'everyday.' He is a shaman riding upon the storm-split house, the family tree that wanders through Minsk, Brooklyn, and Jersey, the love-sculpted bedclothes, the parent grown perplexing, and the handwriting of the dead. Nothing that is human is alien to Lewis in these fine poems, which perform again and again the gutsy feat of stealing the graveyard flowers.--Patrick Donnelly