Sometimes Full of Daylight

Poetry. Owen Lewis's poems do us the huge favor of restoring a radical and essential strangeness to the so-called 'everyday.' He is a shaman riding upon the storm-split house, the family tree that wanders through Minsk, Brooklyn, and Jersey, the love-sculpted bedclothes, the parent grown perplexing, and the handwriting of the dead. Nothing that is human is alien to Lewis in these fine poems, which perform again and again the gutsy feat of stealing the graveyard flowers.--Patrick Donnelly