I Have to Tell You Something

In the world of Eddie Dowe's poems, Adam and Eve stand under the maple, confessing to their uncertainty at the aftermath. Whose child is it that climbs into their bed, complaining at their lateness, insisting he is "ready to be named"? The moon is bald; the stars have teeth; buffalo "[eat] stars in a dark field." Everything in the universe of I Have to Tell You Something is hornets, burning handshakes, and yearning. It is studded with graveyards, but the poet puts a window in each one and "[pulls] the curtains back." Which is to say, in these strange times, we might still learn to feel as the poet does: "I am a dying man / but a dying man still lives." The secret he insists on delivering in each poem, then, is that we're invited.

Luisa A. Igloria, Poet Laureate of Virginia and Author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts and Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser

Mack Daddy surrealist Robert Desnos wrote "the living and the dead yield to me and salute me / the former coldly the latter warmly." Eddie Dowe's debut I Have to Tell You Something kindly ferrets out the catacomb Mack Daddy never quite found exhumed completely. Whatever contagious household generosity resides in loneliness, Dowe's lines are the wooziest. "The house behind me / tilted like a tiara while the child holds my hand / and points to my family who wave their fists / from the porch. We love you, they shout, / but I am already running through the wet grass / beneath green trees singing / the last song of my life." Who retains rights to the extended version of that tune?

Jeffrey Hecker, Author of Ark Aft

These poems simply walk off the page and break into the backroom of your mind, that place we both fear and covet. With imagery both troubling and wonderful, Eddie Dowe has conjured a new portrait of the American psyche. This book will shred the map of your day.

Tim Seibles, former Poet Laureate of Virginia and Author of One Turn Around the Sun