Happy Everything
Alumni, 2010 - Creative Writing at The New School
Cornerstone Press, 2024
“Caitlin Cowan has written the kind of book women poets were once warned against. Plathian in its ferocious truth-telling, it refuses to be shushed, spinning narratives of cheating fathers and husbands, of men with ‘rabbit-rattlesnake / risotto’ on their breath. Cowan brilliantly frames the poems via epigraphs from a cooking and etiquette manual, and offers a sequence of prose poems titled after relics of material culture, as in ‘Leifheit PerleHandheld Crumb Sweeper,’ in which the crumber is ‘a tiny metal cog in / a creaking old machine, an industry as old as I do.’ The underlying reality of the book is the excruciating ache of containment in that creaking machine, and the lyric mode as a powerful mechanism of liberation.”
—Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
“Caitlin Cowan’s Happy Everything takes on birthdays, anniversaries, Easter, Mother’s Day, the New Year, Halloween—all the markers that insist upon celebration, whether or not the speaker feels joy. Happy Everything is the antidote to Hallmark cards, to the Hallmark channel, to forced gaiety as it is thrust upon women to perform happiness and beauty no matter their real life events. Cowan subverts what we think we know about marriage and divorce and the traumas of childhood in a witty, heartbreaking voice all her own. This is a terrific debut!”
—Denise Duhamel, author of Second Story
The urge to create beauty and be beautiful haunts Happy Everything, Caitlin Cowan’s powerful celebration of feminine resilience. The materiality of marriage and divorce abound in the postnuptial ghost stories Cowan tells with no-nonsense, Midwestern frankness and the intimacy of an afterparty conversation in a corner booth. Happy Everything is a deranged wedding registry of various poetic forms which highlight the perverse tenacity of ancestral traumas and the paradoxes inherent to women’s relationships with men. These poems are a collage of traditions from a past that women are continually attempting to escape.