Books published by Bowen Press

"It's true: not all good things / harmonize, but sometimes, / sometimes / they do."Drawing its title from Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s death in Hamlet, the original poems in Aaron Chase Eddington’s A Willow Grows Aslant a Brook focus on the beauty inherent in tragedy and offer a hopeful, redemptive view of loss and grief.Eddington’s poetry navigates trauma, beauty, and pain with a perspective of optimism, growth, and renewal. Focused on images, memories, and moments, A Willow Grows Aslant a Brook looks past abstractions in search of “something between / water and blood / soul and flesh.”AARON CHASE EDDINGTON is a writer and educator based in the Dallas area. Born and raised in east Texas, he is also the author of a chapbook titled A Birdwatcher’s Guide to the American South.

The year is 1875, and a young physician's wife, Sarah Archer, is settling into a new life on the Iowa frontier, expecting her first child. A survivor of the Civil War, she wrestles with troubling memories of her childhood on her family's Alabama plantation. As Sarah struggles amid anger, love, and the inherited lies of "ladyhood," she realizes that her greatest struggle is within herself.Revolving around the mysterious disappearance of Seth, the enslaved boy Sarah loved, Eldorado, Iowa braids scenes of Sarah's childhood on the plantation before and during the war with her present life on the Midwestern frontier, the accidents of small-town life, and the daily textures of marriage, domesticity, and grace. Exploring the ties of love, anger, silence, and misunderstanding, Eldorado, Iowa explores how we grow through, and beyond, what we think we know of our pasts in order to discover our true homes, our true lives, and our true paths into the future.AMY WELDON (PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is professor of English at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. She is the author of The Hands-On Life: How to Wake Yourself Up and Save the World and The Writer's Eye: Observation and Inspiration for Creative Writers.

Young Darnell Rabren is lost and confused in Mississippi, and he and his friend, Judson, are on an epic quest to discover the meaning of life. Darnell knows a lot, but there's a lot he doesn't know, and his misadventures with Judson across the swampy south will leave you as delighted, bewildered, and incredulous as Darnell himself.Their friendship will be tested and their senses of self strengthened as they visit friends, do odd jobs, entertain visions, and recite poetry. Ultimately, a questionably executed voyage down the river will test them in ways they never thought possible, and they are forced to confront not only the truth about themselves but about the world around them in this rollicking adventure epic.JOHN CALVIN HUGHES has published in numerous magazines and journals, including Dead Mule, Southern Indiana Review, and Mississippi Review. His publications include a critical study, The Novels and Short Stories of Frederick Barthelme; a poetry chapbook, The Shape of Our Luck; two novels, Twilight of the Lesser Gods and Killing Rush; and a full-length poetry collection, Music from a Farther Room. His newest poetry chapbook, Cul- de-sac Agonistes, was published in 2017. He lives and works in Florida.

In this carefully curated collection of original poems, Coty Poynter explores the experience of absence, disappearance, and loss. The people around us possess great power over us, and Delirium addresses that phenomenon with empathy and beauty.In this labyrinthine fever dream of stages on life's way, there is always more than meets the eye. Insomnia, memory, distance, trauma, focus, and resolution all make an appearance in this moving poetic narrative.Delirium parallels an individual life lived over seemingly never-ending years of pain, confusion . . . and ultimately relief.COTY POYNTER is a Baltimore-based writer and editor. He was the lead fiction editor for the 2016-2017 edition of Grub Street, Towson University's literary and arts magazine, and is an editorial assistant at Charles Street Research. Currently, he focuses his creative endeavors to the exploration of memory, past and present, and the resilience of the human spirit through poetry and, more recently, short fiction. He's also the author of the poetry collection The Singing Heart (2016).

In I'm Just Saying, his first book of poems, verbal artist Aaron Dunn explores the potential of our shared use of language. His work often suggests multiple meanings through first-person reflection on events, memories, and personal struggle. Through these honest, empathetic, challenging, and interactive poems, he seeks to inspire us all to discover meaning in the world through words.AARON DUNN is a writer, poet, communicator, and creative professional who lives in Tyler, Texas with his wife, Chelsey. Aaron has performed at numerous spoken-word and poetry slam events and regularly shares his perspective through his website and social platforms.

Boris Sokoloff, a doctor in Russia during the tumultuous years of the Russian Revolution and a survivor of the infamous Butyrki prison, has a remarkable story to tell. During his fascinating life he encountered nearly every major political and cultural figure in Russia between 1917 and 1920 and was an eyewitness of or participant in most of the major events of the period-the October Revolution, the Constituent Assembly, an assassination attempt on Lenin's life, and the final collapse of the Northern Front. The White Nights is his story.While The White Nights will engage the historically minded, it is as much a work of literature as it is history. Sokoloff consciously imitates a generation of great Russian authors, such as Anton Chekhov, the master of the Russian short story. Sokoloff gives his readers not a single narrative, but fifteen short stories, some of them murder mysteries, others romances or political thrillers. Each of these dramas has its own vivid cast of characters, its own play-like set, and its own heroes and villains. And all are depicted upon a vast stage: the anarchic, disintegrating Russian Empire.The White Nights reads as a work of literary impressionism, with Sokoloff's colorful, pointillist strokes filling in the canvas of the Russian revolutionary era. Most dramatically, Sokoloff challenges his readers with the moral problems inherent in a failed assassination attempt on Lenin in which he participated in the spring of 1918. In each instance, those in positions to do something failed. As the West finds its democratic values increasingly contested at home and abroad, it is a timely lesson to remember what happens when those who believe in freedom fail to act.IAN ONA JOHNSON is associate director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and lecturer in the Department of History at Yale University. He was the recipient of the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship and the H. F. Guggenheim Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, and he was also a Smith-Richardson Predoctoral fellow in International Security Studies at Yale. He is the author of The Faustian Bargain: Secret Soviet-German Military Cooperation in the Interwar Period, forthcoming in 2018 from Oxford University Press.