Making Progress

by Janet Bowdan

Overview

Bowdan's poems pay attention to behaviors we may not want to notice of ourselves, woven with humor and affection into the story of her blended family against a backdrop of society's evolving expectations of girl, woman, wife and mother. With the girl who walks into and out of a cave, with the passenger on a cruise where the captain jumps ship, we investigate how imagination and fear, love and pride change the options we thought we had.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781635345377
Publisher:	Finishing Line Press
Publication date:	06/22/2018
Series:	New Women's Voices , #142
Pages:	42
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.10(d)

About the Author

Janet Bowdan's poems have been published in many journals, including APR, Crazyhorse, Verse, Gargoyle, Free State Review, Isthmus and The Peacock Journal, as well as the anthologies Best American Poetry 2000, Poetry Daily and Ice Cream Poems. She teaches English and creative writing at Western New England University, where she also edits Common Ground Review. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, with her husband, son, and sometimes a lovely stepdaughter or two.

Table of Contents

Sneak 1

12,000 Years Ago, a Girl Was Walking around a Cave 2

Behind the scenes 4

Rock Creek 5

Circus 6

Walking on the wall 7

The Year 8

Wandering: A History of Whiskey 9

The Imaginary Housewives 10

Origami & Natural Selection 11

Jamie & Rachel in Liza Lou’s Kitchen 12

Painting: Still Life with Dog 14

Heads Up! 16

Nutcracker: Leah Entrances 17

Mr. Small and the Changing Seasons 19

I am the house 20

Crack of Dawn 21

At the International Spy Museum 22

The Magnetic Mine 23

Wanted: Panopticon, 4 bedrooms, 3 baths 25

Memory Ward 26

Somewhere 27

Siren 28

Cruise 29

Falcon Cam, U. Mass-Amherst 31

Frankenstein, my father, & me 32

Editorial Reviews

Reading Janet Bowdan’s Making Progress is like talking to a friend so smart and funny you’re in awe, and so thoughtful you want to be a better person, and just so good at writing poems that matter that your heart skews, and around page 25 when the end is near you get a little mad, because nothing this good should end. These are familiar scenes: the triangle of woman, man, child; a nursing home; a cruise ship, and it’s as if a friend is telling you stories of a bent domesticity, and if there’s a tear in your eye she put it there, and if you’re laughing —well, you’re both laughing, which means you’re not alone, and that’s progress.

Karen Skolfield, Author, Frost in the Low Areas

Janet Bowdan sings into catastrophe and intrigue. The disaster is about to happen, or else it’s just occurred. At times the mayhem is glaring, but as often it provides a kind of background music to innocuous day to day experiences. Making Progress is the story of our evolution, from leaving the cave to changing the course of rivers and burning fields. It’s an evolution of contrived accidents and prepared spontaneity. What makes us monsters, from Betty Crocker to Frankenstein, is what makes us human.

Barrett Warner, Associate Editor, Free State Review

www.freestatereview.com, Author of Why Is It So Hard to Kill You?

A feast of imagination and intense meditation, Making Progress is itself a progression of language and lived aesthetics. From the recovery of a past tense (snike!) through the discovery of a “sudden husband,” from the possibility of accidentally breathing-in angels, to the realization of hearts being “like a rhythm band inside us,” Janet Bowdan’s accomplishments make a delirious delight of poetry, no matter how serious and even deadly the landscape through which the book travels.

Bin Ramke, Editor, Denver Quarterly, Author of Missing the Moon, Aerial, and Theory of Mind: New & Selected Poems.

From the Publisher