The Wrecks of Eden

January 2001
88 pages | ISBN 978-0-919897-80-9

"These are poems of deep and original accomplishment. From the elegiac opening section, The Lost, in which extinct species of plants, birds and animals are detailed and mourned, to the masterful sequence of praise which concludes the book, Catherine Owen proves herself to be observant and attentive to the music of the world. I haven't read poems this generous in a long time." – Theresa Kishkan

"The Wrecks of Eden re-animates, superbly, the corpses of the fauna so blithely tortured, slaughtered, wasted, by our civilization's pursuit of ecocide. Catherine Owen's macabre menagerie testifies to our gross inhumanity to nature. A superbly clear-eyed poet, an anti-romantic Audubon, her precise elegies enter the heart like scalpels." – George Elliott Clarke

Reviews

Look to nature during National Poetry Month (George Elliott Clarke, The Sunday Herald, 4/7/2002)
"Owen's smart and smarting poems, her catalogue of carnage, returns unrepentantly to the  now-reborn U.S. poet Robinson Jeffers and his similar alarm at our inhumanity to nature. The Wrecks of Eden is very, very good – and desperately important."

Poems you really ought to read (George Fetherling, The Vancouver Sun, 2/16/2002)
"The book may look like a collection of lyrics but it's very much a unified whole, going deeply into its core concerns, unafraid of the consequences."

Interviews

Interview with Catherine Owen (John Herbert Cunningham, Prairie Fire Magazine, 1/2/2010

About the Author

Catherine Owen is the author of ten collections of poetry and three of prose, including her compilation of interviews on writing called The Other 23 & a Half Hours: Or Everything You Wanted to Know that Your MFA Didn’t Teach You (Wolsak & Wynn, 2015) and her short story collection, The Day of the Dead (Caitlin Press, 2016). Her work has been nominated for awards, toured Canada eight times and appeared in anthologies, as well as translations. She has been employed by both the Locations and the Props department in TV land, plays metal bass and has two cats: Solstice and Equinox.

Other Titles by this Author

Locations of Grief: An Emotional Geography (2020)

Dear Ghost, (2017)

The Other 23 & a Half Hours: Or Everything You Wanted to Know that Your MFA Didn't Teach You (2015)

Catalysts: Confrontations with the muse (2012)

Seeing Lessons (2010)

Shall: ghazals (2006)