Scott Owens’s authentic new collection eventually is full of strong poems: some haiku, some senryu, and some almost-haiku. Owens employs clear language, arresting us with notable observations. This book eventually will whisper like wind at our ears until we take it with us.

--Lenard D. Moore, author of A Million Shadows At Noon and past president of the Haiku Society of America

In his collection of haiku distilled over decades, Scott Owens refreshes our sense of the extraordinary in the ordinary: a tractor pausing for wildflowers; a daughter eating honeysuckle; crocus shouldering through frozen ground; the heat-song of cicadas through a screen door; driving through “a billion years of mountain;” watching “rain and everything/ that comes with rain.”

--Dave Russo, Founding Member of The Haiku Foundation

I want to see / the cosmos blooming. O joyful longing, O delicious double meaning, O cosmos which inhabits these 3-line poems by Scott Owens! The universe, and the universal, live on each page: mornings and seasons; birds, insects, and a daughter; present and eternity. I pause with the poet in a moment’s perfect awareness. I open my eyes, my ears, my heart with the poet’s perfectly observed image. I ponder long while sharing the poet’s reflections and Missy Cleveland’s deceptively simple line drawings, their nature complimenting and enhancing the words. Come rain, come turning days and wandering nights, come deep and come true – come see the cosmos blooming!

--Bill Griffin, naturalist and author of How We All Fly

You don’t see much of Scott Owens among short forms publications since he publishes huge amounts of free verse, but you should see more. Scott’s creative mind works magic wherever it goes and it certainly does in eventually, his new haiku/ senryu book. A lot of nonreaders of the form think haiku is just three lines with a set number of syllables, mostly of things like flowers and clouds. On the contrary, haiku is a wonderful way of condensing a moment in time, grabbing it and watching it stick to your gut. It can make you laugh, gasp in awe, or step into another world, yours or the writer’s. One example from the book especially delights me: “honeysuckle smell — my daughter comes in/from eating summer”. Another that speaks to my own love of the sea is: “morning fills the sea —/fear not the only thing/ that makes us tremble”. You can feel the ‘oh yes’ surge through you as you read both. Befitting the title of the book, this next one really speaks: “I’ve planted this much/ to be sure at the end the ground/will take me back”. The subtlety of the cut, (known as kireji in the haiku/senryu world), at the end of line one is especially well done. Drawings scattered throughout the book, by Missy Cleveland, add to its charm. I hope you read it. I’m glad I did.

--Pris Campbell, author of My Southern Childhood