Visitation, poetry by John Glowney

Publication Date: March 15, 2022

Paperback, 96 pages

ISBN: 978-1-956782-02-8

$25.00 retail, $19.50 from publisher

“Honesty is what we demand,” John Glowney declares in the poem “Proof of Life,” and throughout his debut collection Visitation it is honesty that he delivers, hard truths about contemporary life that arrive in burning, burnished words. At the outset he defines visitation as “a special dispensation of divine favor or wrath / a severe trial / an official visit for inspection or supervision”, and his poems indeed constitute an inspection and document of wrath and trials (and even some moments of favor), of a universe broken from the beginning that nevertheless gives us life, the “total stranger” to which we owe everything. In the title poem that closes the volume, Glowney observes his neighbor taking out the garbage at night, a “working-class / Santa” in underwear and flip-flops who is a “great and unknowable and terrible” god for the creatures who depend on his trash for sustenance, who has “risen anyway / from his tv and his bag of potato chips / as if he understood the role of a god / is to atone for his long absences.” There are glimpse of such atonement throughout these poems, and they are sustenance indeed.

Praise for John Glowney & Visitation

There’s a moment in John Glowney’s long-awaited collection, Visitation, set in a tent pitched next to “the tilted swells and troughs” of the Pacific, where the speaker reads poems with a flashlight. It’s an act of awe and affirmation. Glowney writes tilted, furious poems worthy to be read next to the Pacific and the tides of bad news that describe our contemporary world. His poems are sometimes heartsick, sometimes darkly comic expressions of our powerlessness, but they are such redeeming company.

—Kathleen Flenniken, author of Plume & Post Romantic

John Glowney’s poems have a way of leaping from one image to another, from the profane to the sacred and back again. As I read this excellent book, I felt spellbound by the precision of the language and by the leaps of the subjects. His poems are one part elegance, the other part guts. Here’s John Glowney in the middle of the air. That other rope, the one he’s got to catch, dangles far away and in the dark. Here am I, the reader, the audience, forgetting to breathe.

—Charlotte Pence, author of Code, 2020 Book of the Year from Alabama Poetry Society

John Glowney blows me away as a poet who holds the mirror up to American’s tacky underside in poems that are vivid, lurid, tender, and droll. At the same time, he doesn’t look askance at the sad brilliance that so often accompanies the parade of underdogs, sadsacks, and scofflaws. They are the lopsided antiheroes we know as our secret selves, and yet he treats his subjects—self included—with a kind of ironic exaltation. So my hat’s off to him. Visitation is a terrific achievement, a toast to Americana and an extended elegy all in one, the likes of which you’re unlikely to find anywhere else. I put it down, happy with my envy of his imaginative mastery and transcendence, poem after poem.

—David Rigsbee, author of This Much I Can Tell You & others

About the Author

John Glowney's work has appeared in North American Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Shenandoah, 32 Poems, Michigan Quarterly Review, River Styx, Mid-American Review, and many other journals. He is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, Poetry Northwest’s Richard Hugo Prize, and the Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Memorial Award. He lives in Seattle.