Praise

I love it that Maureen Owen is talking to us again & I love it in the forms she gives it to us plus she’s reinvented the surrealism of the household and of the movies and of the refrain. We’re all thrilled again at the generosity of the reader’s window.
—Bernadette Mayer

Maureen Owen’s work has always been unique, and unusual in its look; the poem moves across the page mimicking a player piano roll in the way it triggers the synapses. To read her poems is to play her melody. She can be compared to Bonnie Raitt in that she has a strong confident voice with earthy overtones. In some poems, she echoes that pervasive and persuasive American folk style, the blues, and blends it with classical lament.
—Pat Nolan

Maureen Owen works like a painter who has to stay up all night balancing a face:
There is this urge to know everything window
like a painting of a real tree
Her subjects are emotions, the intransigence of real things, their beauty. Poems of the pleasures of summer and the visual world—of anger—awkwardness—pains of lost love, not enough money; these are the presences in which she works. One might study for a long time the spaces in her poetry. Its formal rigor, schooled in Zen, has a particular capacity to surprise, since it happens in a voice so casual, absorbed and carried away.
I’m reminded of a print by the Catalan artist Antoni Tapies that was shown this summer in New York, an image of two chairs facing each other, the ecstatic line held down by the sobriety of the medium—each Carborundum, a black abrasive. For if in Owen’s words
At the hem of twilight she has flung the carrot tops
there’s still dirt under her nails, and it’s still a poem of a woman throwing some garbage out on the ground.
—Barbara Einzig