Clarke OwensThe author is a lump of earth exuding language before going silent. You could take a handful of earth from the banks of the Sacramento River, and a handful from the banks of the Nile, and it would be the same earth. Clarke Owens grew up in Sacramento California, the son of an Anglo father and a Mexican-American mother, both schoolteachers. His first meaningful job was playing guitar for a pop/rock band in Los Angeles. He later became a typesetter in San Francisco, and wrote arts reviews for a tabloid newspaper. He held many other jobs, including teaching English at colleges and universities in Ohio and New Hampshire. In mid-life, he changed careers, becoming an attorney, and doing mostly criminal defense and appeals. He retired from this career after twenty years, and currently lives on a farmette in Ohio with his wife, poet, essayist, and novelist Deborah Fleming, and her horse and cats.Clarke writes poems, stories, novels, and occasional criticism. He wrote mostly prose prior to the turn of the century. While practicing law, he would sometimes return to the university to teach the occasional class, which involved discussing poetry and fiction with students. After decades of doing this, he began to feel more confident about how poems worked. Beginning in 2006, he began publishing more poems in literary magazines. The poems in this chapbook are taken from those that were published from 2006 to 2017. Read More Read Less