Scott Owens describes his new volume of poetry: I grew up in two worlds: my father’s parents’ world of brick homes, city streets, shopping, and playgrounds; and my mother’s parents’ world of dirt roads, livestock, growing our own food, and endless woods. That second world was undeniably harder than the first. The work was dirtier, and there was more of it. The homes had fewer luxuries: no cable, no AC, never more than one bathroom. Even death was different. In town, death was a polished event that took place elsewhere: hospitals, nursing homes, slaughter houses, funeral parlors. On the farm, animals were killed every week and most people died at home, and their bodies stayed there until they were buried. Somehow, however, that second world still seemed much more alive, much more real and vital. Despite that vitality, I was aware that most people knew almost nothing about that second world. It was then, and is increasingly now, an undiscovered country where life and death exist side by side with a natural intensity missing from the artificial world of the city. This book, Owens tells us, dedicated to my grandfather (one who knew how to own land), is a record of my undiscovered country and the people who lived there. Critical Acclaim “Landscape and memory are seamlessly merged in this excellent volume. Like all the best writers of place, Scott Owens finds the heart’s universal concerns in his vivid rendering of piedmont Carolina.” —Ron Rash, Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University “There’s not a speck of sentimentality in the rural poetic Americana framed by Scott Owens in For One Who Knows How to Own Land. There are dead crows, red dirt earth, barking dogs, burning coal, fox traps, and flooding rivers. These stories matter. The poems all rattle and sing. This is a jolt of strong coffee for a watery time.” —John Lane, author of The Woods Stretched for Miles: Contemporary Nature Writing from the South “In For One Who Knows How to Own Land, poet Scott Owens creates, with a mature voice, childhood reminiscences of pastoral summers in the red-dirt rural Piedmont of upstate South Carolina. This, his most affecting collection to date, is a remarkable sensory journey that registers narrative moments along the entire emotional scale from harsh to tender, from the threatening to the anodyne. Through the magical nature of memory, these poems of mystery and loss prove again and again that ‘The boy who left this country/ never stopped hearing its names/ echo in his ear.’” —Tim Peeler, author of Checking Out “‘Why should this be home?’ Scott Owens asks us in ‘Homeplace,’ his question as much about leaving as going back. We walk his train tracks and ridges as if they were our own, as though home were ‘something you held tight before you,/ your back bending against its going away.’ In this both visceral and meditative rendering of place, decay and rebirth are part of the same landscape. I applaud the skill that directs us down a path of experience and familiarity to ‘stone steps/ that dead-end in mid-air.’ His poetry is wise in knowing the weight of its own footsteps.” —Linda Annas Ferguson, author of Dirt Sandwich

For One Who Knows How to Own Land

Literature & Fiction

Owens, Scott

Poetry

FutureCycle Press

The Fractured World

Main Street Rag

Something Knows the Moment

Lizzy and her friends find that they can do anything if they try hard enough.

Lizzy the Model T

Children's Books

Cars, Trains & Things That Go

Newman Springs

Worlds Enough: Poems for and about children (and a few grown ups)

Redhawk Publications

Praise for Prepositional: In Prepositional Scott Owens highlights the preposition as a metaphor for shared humanity, and with an engaging playfulness, he explores human relationships and the world at large, drawing upon a rich mosaic of life experiences. Owens parses our connections, "As you are a part, I am a part, /and though we can be just one, / we are always also many, / and we can never be completely apart." Brimming with artistry, Prepositional also displays our universality: "Where I come from/ is the same place you come from..." Throughout the book subtle humor abounds, bringing text and subtext into play: "Without prepositions it's hard to imagine/ where we would end up." Prepositional sweeps the reader on a rollicking journey in lyric landscapes of language, where "So much of who we are/resides there - between the lips/of any human mouth."-Ami Kaye, Publisher & Editor, Glass Lyre PressScott Owens writes poetry as if he were a painter, seeing more than other people see, looking beyond the obvious. Owens sees and invites the reader to visualize images, actions, beliefs, purposes, motives, and results of what he has gleaned from his life as a child, a husband, a father, a teacher, a human being who took notice.In "Where I Come From" he explores how we are more alike than different. "On Settelmeyer Bridge," shows us that "only the names change." This is a collection of some of Owens's most loved poems mixed with newer poems such as "Coffee During Covid." Toward the end of the book, he writes about aging, what he treasures and what he has learned. In "Nearing the End of my Sentence," he writes "I long for a semi-colon, a dash, a parenthesis, at least another comma." This is another Scott Owens book I will read again and again.-Glenda Council Beall - poet, authorIn Prepositional Scott Owens trues the lapping sand from "Where I Come From" all the way to the Dollar General where he offers the truth that words work the way they do for the enrichment of us all. We must keep on keeping on seems to be the root message, and enjoying it as we do. His philosophical lyrics prove that "Where there is language there is art."-Shelby Stephenson's recent book is Country. He was poet laureate of North Carolina from 2015-2018Poet Scott Owens has been working steadily, especially in the period since 2006 on poetry that distinguishes itself craft-wise with a seamless quality that links a powerfully disturbing history to a fulfilling, successful adulthood. In Prepositional, he eschews the expectations for the New and Selected format by offering decidedly more of the New, a circumstance that will delight his devoted readers. If you know Scott's work, you'll know that Norman is here, of course, to direct all these flashing memories and precise observations down the forever river, "refusing to be forgotten."-Tim Peeler, author and editor About the Author Scott Owens holds degrees from Ohio University, UNC Charlotte, and UNC Greensboro. He is a Professor of Poetry at Lenoir Rhyne University, former editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review and Southern Poetry Review. He owns and operates Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse and Gallery and coordinates Poetry Hickory. He is the author of 17 collections of poetry and recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, the Next Generation/Indie Lit Awards, the North Carolina Writers Network, the North Carolina Poetry Society, and the Poetry Society of South Carolina. He has been featured in The Writer's Almanac seven times, and his articles about poetry have been featured frequently in Poet's Market.

Prepositional: New and Selected Poems

Sequen to Their Shadows Trail Them Home

All In: A Novel of Love in Poetry

Campbell, Pris

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Books by Owens, Scott