Happy Everything - by Caitlin Cowan (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

SILVER MEDAL, Poetry, Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPYs) (2025)

FINALIST, Medal Provocateur & Category (Poetry), Eric Hoffer Awards (2025)​

The urge to create beauty and be beautiful haunts Happy Everything, Caitlin Cowan's powerful celebration of feminine resilience. The materiality of marriage and divorce abound in the postnuptial ghost stories Cowan tells with no-nonsense, Midwestern frankness and the intimacy of an afterparty conversation in a corner booth. Happy Everything is a deranged wedding registry of various poetic forms which highlight the perverse tenacity of ancestral traumas and the paradoxes inherent to women's relationships with men. These poems are a collage of traditions from a past that women are continually attempting to escape.

Review Quotes

"Caitlin Cowan has written the kind of book women poets were once warned against. Plathian in its ferocious truth-telling, it refuses to be shushed."

-Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

"Cowan subverts what we think we know about marriage and divorce and the traumas of childhood in a witty, heartbreaking voice all her own."

-Denise Duhamel, author of Second Story

"Cowan's poems sear with wit, precision, and a steadfast allegiance to the underground sisterhood that keeps us human."

-Jenny Molberg, author of The Court of No Record

"Cowan's language is rich and often deeply witty, seducing the reader into the poem's embrace, its song of life, a life fully lived on at least eleven different levels."

-B. H. Fairchild, author of An Ordinary Life