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.
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"Owen is an original in her approach to the ordinary, which turns out to be anything but ordinary." --THE LOUISIANA REVIEW.
"Sue Owen's MY DOOMSDAY SAMPLER favors an imaginative excursion through the tropes of American English itself, those familiar idioms by which we rationalize daily life." --NEW ORLEANS REVIEW.
"Owen is neither a novice poet nor are her poems cliched. These poems reveal a stern wit and intense playfulness that presses beyond superficial appearances." --HARVARD REVIEW.
"Poet Emily Dickinson wrote, 'Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it.' Sue Owen fights the conspiracy." --WRITERS AT WORK.
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