…Here, as everywhere in this collection, Bowman’s finely calibrated, ornate, diction creates an experience that is at once ethereal and earthy, simultaneously peephole and tented field, a rookery for tears and joy….  Read the full review here.

What Bowman seems constantly to ask is what can we save from our pasts? What is tangible, and who do we lose to the distortion of our own memory, our own points of view? These jangling, off-balance, often sneakily meditative poems are among the most interesting and formally inventive I’ve read by any living writer.

This poetical homage politicizes Sylvia Plath, showing her to be less a victim than a citizen of her time, whom history can misrepresent but not silence….Bowman’s work shifts the posthumous perception of Sylvia’s incantatory aspirations as not neurotic, but heartbreaking

Catherine Bowman viewed Plath’s personal effects, cut-outs, and drawings, and they inspired her to produce a remarkable series of poems. By consulting The Plath Cabinet, we can perceive….a sort of idolatry of the feminine that was later refigured into an iconoclastic attack in the greatest of Plath’s poems. Bowman draws attention to the idolatry, moving us inside the divided mind that would turn against itself through a violent rejection of feminine ideals and then through self-violence. Bowman approaches a predecessor as obsessed with the desire to speak as with the desire to shut up or be shut up