"This is a poet of importance, a poet who knows this western American landscape and renders its hidden stories and details--ranch life, work, horses, trails, red-tail hawks--in absolutely gorgeous language, weaving a complex portrait of place that is by turns elegiac and starkly realistic. Poem after poem consists of rich, beautiful language, unerringly sophisticated and surprising at every turn. It would be a disservice to say this poet has arrived; judging from the brilliance of this book, Michael Bowden arrived a long time ago, and we are only now catching up." Amy Miller, Final judge & previous Louis Award Winner for The Trouble with New England Girls "Common Uproar is an exquisitely crafted collection. Bowden gathers many seasons of careful, empathetic observations into poems polished like Bisbee turquoise. Often on the borderlands, he navigates the flow of truth through a lifetime, examining places where memories become dreams and bodies vanish into the desert. The reader is left with the glorious sensation of 'understanding almost' everyday moments of haunting beauty before they disappear, quick on the wing." Megan Baxter, author of The Coolest Monsters "Bowden's poems regard memory, family, the natural world--classic poetic subjects--but handle them with such quiet authority, such vivid delicacy, they shine." Jefferson Carter, author of Birkenstock Blues

This memoir is personal and intense, a vision that is half paradise, half abattoir. It is Brett telling of growing up in the shadow of his peg-legged, strongman potato-peddling father, as he reveals that he is a hermaphrodite - sometimes angelic in his insights and also physically powerful, yet always on the brink of dying. Through excruciating pain in his bones and drug-induced hallucinations, he has stayed alive into his middle years as a storyteller with a huge appetite for life and words - a man of brilliance and courage, who has confronted the essential questions and conundrums of existence.