Memory's Wake - Softcover

Memory’s Wake is a brilliant, haunting masterpiece. Owens uncovers a tale of devastating brutality and intimate struggle with prose so inspired, so precisely, languidly beautiful it leaves you breathless. This story of one mother’s unfathomable hatred and one mother’s transcendent love is more than a personal history. Through revealing his mother’s trials and trauma Owens delivers us into the arms of our best and strangest self. The self capable of more than survival, capable of grace. Not since David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives has an American writer excavated the landscape of familial, spiritual and historical wreckage with such intelligence and honesty. Memory’s Wake is a profound and  deeply moving memoir, apocalyptic in the truest sense of the word. Cara Hoffman (author of So Much Pretty) Derek Owens’ Memory’s Wake is a solitary son’s journey into the forgotten burrows of New York State’s “Burnt Over District.” He uncovers an ancient American Furnace ready still, even in its twilights, to spread the upheavals of trance, hallucination, and the showers of whispers that seem to rain down out of this so often overlooked geography. He lets himself be bitten deeply by the ghost-footed noises he uncovers and the unsheltered wonders of our claimed and unclaimed ancestral broods who ignited the firestorms of prophesies, dooms, raptures, and locks of talking hair spilling their secrets into the beginning of our twenty-first century lives. David Matlin (author of It Might Do Well With Strawberries)

Derek Owens is the author of Resisting Writings (and the Boundaries of Composition) (Southern Methodist University Press, 1994) and Composition and Sustainability: Teaching for a Threatened Generation (NCTE Press, 2001). His lyric essays, poetry, and fiction have appeared in such journals as Seneca Review, Southampton Review, and Ecopoetics. A Vice Provost and Professor of English at St. John’s University in New York, Owens lives on Long Island with his wife and son.