Books

My first full-length collection of poetry, Between Gods, was published in March 2012.  Between Gods was selected as a notable first book by Beltway Poetry Quarterly.  Interviews about the book appear on the literary website Murder Your Darlings and The Examiner, and a book review by Cort Bledsoe was featured in the Coal Hill Review.

Between Gods is now out of print, but I have a few copies left! You can order directly from me (for $14, including free U.S. shipping), via PayPal.

From some of my favorite writers, praise for Between Gods:

“In entering the world of these poems, we enter a grand, mythic contest.  All around us, time’s steady wind beats and tears apart.  It blurs, softens, calls us out of ourselves, takes away our footing.  And against that a single body – or two, and then a third – pushing back, taking root, re-assembling a world from the inside out.  What we are left with is the molten residue of struggle – carved amber, a sprinkling of stars, poems distilling themselves down to verbs, or scars.  These are extraordinary poems.  Read them slowly.” –Thomas Gardner, Alumni Distinguished Professor of English, Virginia Tech, and author of John in the Company of Poets

“Reading Donna Lewis Cowan’s collection, Between Gods, I had the impression that each poem was better than the one before.  Either this was a miracle of organization or – as I know now to be the case – the mind learns Cowan’s countries as it moves through them.  Stanzas are brief as broken conversations, lines as curt as breaths.  Not one point is too much; all points are saved by shattering truth from being too little.  The poems are spare – the tracks of deer through deep woods – yet pack a wise richness that is part the poet’s remarkable powers of observation, in part an unshakable inwardness that subjects all these observations to the parsing of the spirit.  Whether reading a tectonic plate in Iceland or her daughter’s Lincoln Logs, Cowan brings back every observation to the foundation of her own experience – which is, finally, the best and only authenticity.” –David Brendan Hopes, Professor of Literature and Language, University of North Carolina, Asheville

“Between Gods moves between seasons, between plot-lines, between patterns, and between rooms to examine the force of the hidden in the exploratory wonder of consciousness.  Cowan’s words stand in ‘plain cedar boxes’ on the page but actually hold a light that ‘leaks through the lids in blinding slices,’ turning their very status ‘between’ into a means of shifting the light, of opening up the eyes.  These altered spaces tell us ‘all that is not in the room’ with us, and allow us to look again in order ‘to sketch the borders/before it moves/because it will.’  It is this interior and endlessly shifting light that Between Gods makes its own.” –Esther Richey, Associate Professor of English, University of South Carolina