Solitary Workwoman
Rochelle Owens
152 pages perfectbound
$21.00
ISBN 978-1-881523-18-5
"Rochelle Owens' writing...is sui generis. She is, in many ways, a proto-language poet, her marked ellipses, syntactic oddities, and dense and clashing verbal surfaces recalling the long poems of Bruce Andrews and Ron Silliman. But Owens is angrier, more energetic, and more assertive than most of her Language counterparts, male and female, and she presents herself as curiously non-introspective. Hers is a universe of stark gesture, lightning flash, and uncompromising judgement: it is imperative, in her poetic world, to face up to the horror, even as the point of view is flexible enough to avoid all dogmatism."
- Marjorie Perloff
“Sharp & visual, Owens combines a landscape with a poetics, the domestic with the mythic, machines with the organic living world--from which arises a construct & a fused vision: poetry & life."
- Jerome Rothenberg
“Owens goes cold turkey on the agony and delight of living in this century. She is the Shaman-genius exploring deeper realities in the psychic realm. She reaches down into the living, breathing mystical core and pulls up the forces of chaos spitting and kicking: she gives us back the hungry power of our own imaginations."
- Maureen Owen
A central figure in the international avant-garde for fifty years, Rochelle Owens has published 16 previous volumes of poetry, including New and Selected Poems: 1961-1996 and Luca: Discourse on Life and Death (both Junction Press, 1997 and 2001). She has been the recipient of five Village Voice Obie awards and Honors from the New York Drama Critics' Circle for her plays. Her work has been translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Ukranian and Japanese.