Now for a Little Self Promotion

Only two weeks remain for Advance Orders of "Paternity," my new book from Main Street Rag. Advance Orders qualify for a discounted price of just $9 plus $1 shipping. The regular price, effective after February 1, will be $14 (plus shipping where applicable). Orders can be placed online at http://www.mainstreetrag.com/SOwens_2.html.

Thanks to all those who have already ordered a copy. The book is due for release on Feb. 15.

In case you need more information, I'm pasting in a few comments from my pre-publication readers. You can also see a couple of poems from the book by following the Main Street Rag link in the first paragraph.

I have about 2 dozen readings scheduled across NC, SC, and GA, this spring, including Catawba College, Mitchell Community College, Wayne Community College, Charleston County Public Library, Burke County Library, Alexander County Library, Gaston County Library, Wake Tech Community College, Durham Tech Community College, Wilkes Community College, Malaprops, Osondu Booksellers, Green Rice Gallery, Phillips and Lloyd, Caldwell County Library, and McIntyre's. Once I firm up a few dates, I'll post the complete list here. I hope you'll make it to one of the readings so I can thank you for your support in person. I still have a few dates open, so if you know of a place you'd like me to read, let me know.

Here are the comments I promised. I think all three of these readers got the book just right.

Poems of aching tenderness. PATERNITY explores with a discerning, clear-eyed sensitivity the daily small delights, frustrations, and purely unexpected miracles that, taken together, make up the building blocks of one father's personal salvation.

--Joanna Catherine Scott, author of Night Huntress and Fainting at the Uffizi



In Scott Owens' lovely book of poems, PATERNITY, we have a remarkable account of how his very special relationship with his young daughter, Sawyer, has saved him from the darkness of his own childhood. The poems are engaging in the deepest sense--funny, touching, and full of the kind of wisdom we all need as parents and family members to sustain the balance of daily life. How can anyone resist a girl who makes up the word, "effluctress," to describe what only a four-year old can see.

--Anthony S. Abbott, author of The Man Who.

I’ve never been this strong before/ can only hope I’ll hold this joy, writes Scott Owens in “Naming.” Poem by poem, Paternity builds a father’s world—its fears and joys, its vows, which are too often and too easily broken. Looming over the lives of his children is the childhood of the man who speaks these poems, memories which make the poet grateful for the days I am not my father. It is this ability to feel the weight of the past on his present life and the work of resisting that past even as he builds the present his children live in that makes Paternity a book that should be read not only by parents but by anyone interested in poems that can disturb and console in the same breath.

--Al Maginnes, author of Ghost Alphabet