Mutual Life by Scott Lowery

These poems are full of music and witness—keenly felt and keenly observed. Each delivered with a quiet playful mastery that’s dazzling in the best possible way. Each one brings you into a moment lived and felt, whether it’s a moment of horror, rage or wonder. Fierce, funny, tender and ultimately hopeful, Lowery has transformed the dumpster fire of our recent past into poems you want to visit again and again. 

–Naomi Cohn, founder of Known By Heart Poetry, author of The Braille Encyclopedia 

Mutual Life, Scott Lowery’s stunning new collection of poems, strips away the thin veneer of contemporary American life to reveal the many fissures between hope and despair, dream and reality. The result is a remarkable book that speaks to the immediacy of our own moment, and reminds us again that we are all bound, in our mutual lives, by love and compassion.

–Robert Hedin, author of At the Great Door of Morning: Selected Poems and Translations

Scott Lowery’s poems practice “vigilant listening,” as he puts it. Lowery applies his deeply moral imagination to the daily press of events. But whether addressing the shock of climate change, the difficulties of campaign door-knocking in a conservative neighborhood, or the joys of a newborn granddaughter, his poems also show an allegiance to verbal elegance and careful construction. This book faces the world’s difficulty and offers it something beautiful in return.  

–James Armstrong, author of Empire and Blue Lash

Scott Lowery explores the political and personal urgencies of the last few years, using an astonishing variety of forms and ingenious rhymes and rhythms that remind readers that he is, after all, a musician as well as a verbal magician. Lowery’s poems ask us, finally, to stand ‘shoulder to shoulder among our fellow mortals.’ Readers, step forward. 

–Connie Wanek, author of Rival Gardens

In an America and world dizzy with change, the poems in Mutual Life find both solace and luscious liberation in the depths of interconnection. It is a celebratory, generously communal vision both fortified by and dissatisfied with the yesteryear landscapes of William Stafford and William Carlos Williams. How to celebrate the golden sunlight and also be a good person, family member, and citizen? 

–Ed Bok Lee, author of Mitochondrial Night and Whorled

Pogo said “We have seen the enemy and he is us.” Scott Lowery is telling us the same thing in his chapbook Mutual Life. No, it’s not a book about life insurance, or is it? Lowery expresses anger and frustration at what we have created for ourselves. The poems are razor-sharp and they take no prisoners, but without the overblown rhetoric one often encounters in poems about “issues”. 

–Ken McCullough, author of Broken Gates and Dark Stars

In Mutual Life, Scott Lowery brings a fine attention to detail and tender wisdom as he shows us our shared communal lives with nature, parses the challenges of politics, and sings the rescue and bright shine of family in these times. A book of vigilance, hope and humor, these poems are both luminous and unsentimental, and filled with grace that lifts you up into a wild spiral of wings. 

–Diane Jarvenpa, author of The Way She Told Her Story