Description:
These poems are very Jewish, but fly beyond the enmity of Jews and Palestinians to a deeper sense: "these my sons, these my cousins."
Brief description: Owen Lewis is the author of four collections of poetry and three chapbooks. Honors include the 2024 E.E.Cummings Prize, the 2023 Guernsey International Poetry Prize, the 2023 Rumi Prize for Poetry, the International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. At Columbia University he is Professor of Psychiatry in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics and teaches Narrative Medicine.
Review Quotes: Judge, Poetry News (Poetry Society, U.K.) Winter Competition
"As Owen Lewis says in his masterful, moving, and timely collection A Prayer of Six Wings, "I can't talk about Israel tonight...I can't not talk about Israel tonight." Many have been silenced by fear, and others are finding their voices, but few have been able to make "poetry" out of the horrific October 7th events, and their aftermath. From Owen's home turf on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where posters of the hostages were ripped down nightly, to his granddaughter's birthday party on Hahashmonaim Street, where sudden noises can be popped balloons or bombs falling, these poems of witness are both immediate, musical, and humane, as they ask, "How then, and when, can we imagine peace?" -Richard Michelson, Sleeping as Fast as I Can
On "(from captivity) When living children" "In its divisions and joinings of words, a lyric voice has found a way to create a disordered language in which to render this new poem's subject as lived truth. This poet's empathetic imaginings, no matter their source, become a lyric cry on behalf of those whom the poem speaks of."
-Marcia Karp, If By A Song