Happy Everything - by Caitlin Cowan (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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, spinning narratives of cheating fathers and husbands, of men with 'rabbit-rattlesnake / risotto' on their breath. Cowan brilliantly frames the poems via epigraphs from a cooking and etiquette manual, and offers a sequence of prose poems titled after relics of material culture, as in 'Leifheit Perle Handheld Crumb Sweeper, ' in which the crumber is 'a tiny metal cog in / a creaking old machine, an industry as old as I do.' The underlying reality of the book is the excruciating ache of containment in that creaking machine, and the lyric mode as a powerful mechanism of liberation."

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

"Caitlin Cowan's Happy Everything takes on birthdays, anniversaries, Easter, Mother's Day, the New Year, Halloween-all the markers that insist upon celebration, whether or not the speaker feels joy. Happy Everything is the antidote to Hallmark cards, to the Hallmark channel, to forced gaiety as it is thrust upon women to perform happiness and beauty no matter their real life events. 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

"Caitlin Cowan's debut collection is a celebration against obligation, an origin story of gendered half-truths, and an entreaty toward reclamation, that we may be the 'unruly golden dog' of our own damn stories. Pulsing with a deft balance of wisdom and righteous rage, the masterful, lyrical, and gut-punching poems of Happy Everything look the staid picture of domestic 'happiness' square in the face and say, for all our sakes, 'not good enough.' Punctuated by etiquette manuals and frivolous objects of housewifery, Cowan saws through the harmful messaging of compulsory heterosexuality in an era-defying dialogue with our foremothers of poetry, diving into the wreck and towing us toward 'the truth's frigid / tide.' Evoking Adrienne Rich, Dorianne Laux, and, of course, Plath's 'Daddy, ' Cowan writes of the dangers of 'the wrong wedding': 'Though I will not see my father / again, I will look for him in other men.' The speaker of this book and her mother, in their own ways, know better: 'When [Mama] told me I wouldn't die from this, I listened.' Cowan's poems sear with wit, precision, and a steadfast allegiance to the underground sisterhood that keeps us human: 'the kind who are loved without labor.' In one of the book's several nods to Little Women, the speaker dreams she is a bedridden Beth, but indeed Caitlin Cowan is Jo, most ardently Jo, penning her 'narrative incoherence' into unforgettable verse. Happy Everything, I wish every lucky reader who opens this brilliant book for the first time."

-Jenny Molberg, author of The Court of No Record

"What a rare and welcome surprise it is to come upon a young poet who possesses enough ambition and talent to illuminate-unforgettably, I think, in the case of Caitlin Cowan-what might be called the too muchness of life, to celebrate that nameless mortal abundance variously ending in ecstasy, despair, hope, grief, prayer, emotional collapse, or silent acceptance.... Her 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