The Book of Kin - by Jennifer Eli Bowen (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Finalist for the Minnesota Book Award

"The Book of Kin is an expansive experience . . . beautiful, brave, and inventive."--Hanif Abdurraquib

A remarkable debut that explores the imperfect ways we care for one another, and how we seek repair when care fails.

"What's our obligation to each other?" asks Jennifer Eli Bowen in this propulsive exploration of community, solitude, and love. Drawing on her experiences as a mother, daughter, and founder of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, the country's largest and most enduring prison-based literary organization, she examines the wild spectrum of shapes that care can take. She investigates the role of community across the world and in her own neighborhood, driven by a curiosity to uncover what might be gleaned from various vanishments in her own life: the shadow of her father, disappeared backyard chickens, a Moleskine notebook that passes in and out of her Little Free Library.

Tracing both connection and its lack, Bowen uncovers what happens when it's missing, how we find it, and how it heals individuals, communities, and systems--from the incarcerated caretakers of newborn foals in Norway to the time-bending drama of watching children grow into adults. And through this winding quest to understand love, she moves readers out of their complacency not only about the state of American incarceration, but about what we owe ourselves and society.

Unflinching, vulnerable, and surprisingly funny, The Book of Kin encourages us not to abandon each other, reminding us that "harm is shared, and healing is too."

Review Quotes

"The Book of Kin is a testament to intentional storytelling. Each essay is perfectly placed within the narrative, pulled together with bouts of humor and reflection. . . .A hopeful exploration of what it means to care for one another, The Book of Kin is honest, entertaining, heart-wrenching, and dripping with empathy."--Angie Raney, The Chicago Review of Books

"Bowen explores themes of community, solitude and love, meditating on her own experiences as a mother, daughter, and founder of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, the country's largest prison-based literary organization. Bowen's prose is unique and captivating, utilizing knowledge she's gleaned from her career as well as her personal life."--Minnesota Women's Press

"Bowen writes with such emotional intelligence, beauty, and grace. This book feels like an education, a reckoning, and a guide."--Debutiful, "Noteworthy Debut Books"

"The Book of Kin is an expansive experience, one that, I believe, will be appreciated for its searing and always-seeking approach to tackling large emotions, to wring the secondary colors out of the grander, primary feelings. This book is beautiful, brave, and inventive."--Hanif Abdurraquib, author of There's Always This Year

"This work is an exploration of memory and grief, of incarceration and disappointment. It is a record of finding oneself within the ebb and flow and sometimes utter stillness of life. More than a meditation, this is a loving expression of one woman's labor to find clarity alongside us and even on behalf of us. If you listen closely, this is music that sings our lives."--Lama Rod Owens, author of The New Saints

"Jennifer Eli Bowen invites us to consider what it means to care about others--and to be cared for in return. The Book of Kin is a must-read for anyone asking how we can best find community with those around us, from our families to those imprisoned half a world away."--Laura Leigh Morris, author of The Stone Catchers

"It is fitting that a beloved teacher, sensing the artist's gifts in a young Jennifer Bowen, launches her on what will become a lifelong quest to answer the question of where love comes from. This extraordinary collection is her answer, a living document that honors her ever-evolving attempts to wrestle honestly with the complexity of what still remains within our power when so much of our story has been marked by the absence of love--when it has been warped, withheld, denied, wielded as punishment, or replaced by violence. With prose that marvels from the first sentence to the last, Bowen reminds us of the true root of the word compassion: the rare, yet transcendent ability to hold both tenderness and sorrow, simultaneously."--Inara Verzemnieks, author of Among the Living and the Dead

"Written with a lyric eye, a probing mind, and an enormous heart, this extraordinary book of essays is both a search and an arrival--a quest into the heart of what it means, and requires, to live alongside one another."--Lauren Markham, author of The Far Away Brothers

About the Author

Jennifer Eli Bowen is a writer, arts instructor, and editor. Her work has received a Pushcart Prize, The Arts and Letters Prize, and the Tim McGinnis Award, and her writing has appeared in The Sun magazine, The Iowa Review, Orion, and Kenyon Review. The founder of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, she lives in St. Paul, a block in any direction from sidewalk poetry and snow.