Reading Janet Bowdan’s Making Progress is like talking to a friend so smart and funny you’re in awe, and so thoughtful you want to be a better person, and just so good at writing poems that matter that your heart skews, and around page 25 when the end is near you get a little mad, because nothing this good should end. These are familiar scenes: the triangle of woman, man, child; a nursing home; a cruise ship, and it’s as if a friend is telling you stories of a bent domesticity, and if there’s a tear in your eye she put it there, and if you’re laughing – well, you’re both laughing, which means you’re not alone, and that’s progress.
–Karen Skolfield, Author, Frost in the Low Areas
“Janet Bowdan sings into catastrophe and intrigue. The disaster is about to happen, or else it’s just occurred. At times the mayhem is glaring, but as often it provides a kind of background music to innocuous day to day experiences. Making Progress is the story of our evolution, from leaving the cave to changing the course of rivers and burning fields. It’s an evolution of contrived accidents and prepared spontaneity. What makes us monsters, from Betty Crocker to Frankenstein, is what makes us human.”
–Barrett Warner, Associate Editor, Free State Review
www.freestatereview.com, Author of Why Is It So Hard to Kill You?
A feast of imagination and intense meditation, Making Progress is itself a progression of language and lived aesthetics. From the recovery of a past tense (snike!) through the discovery of a “sudden husband,” from the possibility of accidentally breathing-in angels, to the realization of hearts being “like a rhythm band inside us,” Janet Bowdan’s accomplishments make a delirious delight of poetry, no matter how serious and even deadly the landscape through which the book travels.
–Bin Ramke, Editor, Denver Quarterly, Author of Missing the Moon, Aerial, and Theory of Mind: New & Selected Poems.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.