Knock-knock - Paperback

by Owen Lewis (Author)

A sophisticated chapbook about aging and the brain by a prize-winning poet and professor of psychiatry. The poems come to the reader in a variety of shapes, moods and sounds. The book opens with the speaker's tender first encounters with such age-related issues as the use of a cane for mobility and the occasional challenges of memory. Only a clinical expert in diseases of the mind could have constructed the drama of the scenes that follow.

Knock-knock! Who's there?

Ultimately for all, it will be age. At first, it seems like a bad joke-needing a cane, memory loss, more care, forgetting even one's own name. In Knock-knock, Lewis creates the persona of an older physician who should've known what's in store. Sometimes the reality is grim, but there's humor, love, and even romance in his inventive and poetic story-telling. "Lost-and-found / is not a planned / destination." Yet we all eventually find ourselves there.

Author Biography

Owen Lewis, author of three prior collections of poetry and two chapbooks. Awards include the 2023 Guernsey International Poetry Prize, the 2023 Rumi Prize for Poetry, The Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award (best man) and the International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine. Field Light was a "Must Read" selection of the Mass Book Awards. At Columbia University he is Professor of Psychiatry in Medical Humanities and Ethics.