My Doomsday Sampler: Poems

MY DOOMSDAY SAMPLER provides all the brooding and wit its startling title suggests.  Not only has Sue Owen explored her apocalyptic vision of the potential changes and threats awaiting the world, whether they be environmental, nuclear, or political, but she also has produced a sampler that recalls the artist's craft, like the woman who takes up her needle to stitch her alphabet and reveals the sharpness of her talent.  Owen's sly cipher of twentieth-century dread includes her "Thorn on the Rose," "The Black Pepper," and solitary "Period"--"the dark moon that / no light in my voice / could ever make shine."  She reminds us of our smallness and demise: "You are nothing and your / nothingness will not pass" ("Burnt to a Crisp"), but her imagined doomsday, which includes devils, hell, and angels, is also playful, and she searches hard for the ecstasy of this earth.  In "Crickets," the insects' "notes rise to the stars, / and float up through the / thick night, as if their / joy itself were the only / light we needed to follow."  A beguiling simplicity overlays these fifty poems of dark charm and amusement.  Almost every one a uniform seven quatrains, they often take as their departure point familiar figures of speech.  But from the proverbial, Owen draws forth arresting motifs of fear and dying light as she examines "this shortness / of breath between birth / and the coming grave," achieving a wickedly wry tone in these final minutes of the millennium.

Literature & Fiction

Owen, Sue

Poetry

Louisiana State Univ Pr

<p>In the dark poetry of her newest collection, Sue Owen reflects on the devil’s dreams, the hammering of the last nail in a coffin, and the brilliant death of a shooting star. Owen turns proverbial sayings (in “Getting to the Point,” “Until Hell Freezes Over,” or “If the Other Shoe Drops”) into fully developed parables that examine and elaborate upon the assumptions we all make. This is a cookbook with recipes that instruct, where hell becomes a kitchen of wisdom and insight. The heat in these poems reminds us of the evil in our contemporary lives and challenges us to look straight at it, without fear.</p>

The Devil's Cookbook: Poems

LSU Press

The Book of Winter

Ohio State Univ Pr

Nursery Rhymes for the Dead: Poems

Ithaca House

Sue's Story: How I Survived a Lost Childhood

<p><div> <div>Sue Owen endured emotional, physical, and sexual abuse from a very early age, both from her stepmother and her natural father. A child alone with no one to tell her any different, there was nothing to do but to endure her tormentors and to try and stay alive. Now having faced her persecutors in the courts and having battled with alcholism and an eating disorder, Sue is ready to tell her story of how she came to be at peace after so much pain. It is a story every bit as inspirational as it is harrowing.</div> </div></p>

Parenting & Relationships

Family Relationships

John Blake

This is the true story of one little girl's fight to survive while growing up in a home filled with violence, abuse, and neglect. In this insightful and heartfelt account, Sue Owen reveals what happens when a child cannot rely on the family home to be the safe and respectable refuge it should be. Neglected and bullied by her step-mother throughout her formative years, and abused by her father in her teens, Sue somehow survived to tell the tale and have a family of her own. Determined that her own children would grow up in a happy, loving, and stable environment, Sue began facing her demons through counseling. Yet it wasn't enough, she was still haunted by the past and knew that she would never find peace until she confronted her tormentors. Taking her father to court, Sue began a battle which took her extended family to the brink of destruction as they all tried to come to terms with the awful truth.

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Metro_Books

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Books by Owen, Sue