Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 120
- Language: English
- Date Published: April 8, 2025
- ISBN 978-1-962847-19-3
Praise
A Prayer of Six Wings is an extraordinary book, not for the ideological but for the intellectually and emotionally engaged, and for lovers of poetry and truth. . . . For readers exhausted by the news and resistant to the righteous rhetoric of both sides in this war, Lewis’ vital and elegant, humane and compassionate work will be embraced and treasured. —Alicia Ostriker, The Holy and Broken Bliss: Poems in Plague Time
In this piercing collection, Owen Lewis navigates the year following October 7 from within two worlds – the dislocated and emotionally ruptured landscape of New York and the harsh reality of Israel, where family members go about their daily lives between sirens and gnawing fear. “How will we put these faces together again / these ripped paper faces on the sidewalk?” the poet asks, weaving personal and collective grief into a single voice. Drawing from ancient prayer and contemporary headlines, these poems blur the boundaries between private and public mourning, asking what it means to grieve for strangers, creating a new and stark language for grief, divided families and the persistence of everyday life. —Joanna Chen, Frayed Light (translator)
These lovely, lyrical poems reach across oceans and centuries as Lewis skillfully links the hostages in Gaza to his own grandchildren, the founding of Israel to his own birthday, and biblical history to our contemporary moment. Lewis has composed a haunting book of striking conflations. —Yehoshua November, The Concealment of Endless Light
It calls and it calls and it tears the heart. So precise, it’s precise until it hurts. Here the prophet Joel comments on “from generation to generation”, from the generation of the prophet 2500 years ago: About this to your children tell the story, to your children, to their children, to the generation after. —Yossi Yzraeli, Echos from the Cellar of the Contrabass
About “Remembering the Doves of Ma’agan”:
I instantly loved “The Doves of Ma’agan . . . as I’ve been on Lake Kinneret in northern Israel, and felt how peaceful the ambience is there despite conflicts. I admired the gentle clarity of this poem and how it offers hope that I can almost taste. —Pascale Petit, Tiger Girl, Judge, Poetry News (Poetry Society, U.K.) Winter Competition
As Owen Lewis says in his masterful, moving, and timely collection A Prayer of Six Wings, “I can’t talk about Israel tonight…I can’t not talk about Israel tonight.” Many have been silenced by fear, and others are finding their voices, but few have been able to make “poetry” out of the horrific October 7th events, and their aftermath. From Owen’s home turf on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where posters of the hostages were ripped down nightly, to his granddaughter’s birthday party on Hahashmonaim Street, where sudden noises can be popped balloons or bombs falling, these poems of witness are both immediate, musical, and humane, as they ask, “How then, and when, can we imagine peace?” —Richard Michelson, Sleeping as Fast as I Can
About “(from captivity) When living children”:
In its divisions and joinings of words, a lyric voice has found a way to create a disordered language in which to render this new poem’s subject as lived truth. This poet’s empathetic imaginings, no matter their source, become a lyric cry on behalf of those whom the poem speaks of. —Marcia Karp, If By A Song, Judge of the 2024 E.E. Cummings Prize
A Prayer of Six Wings is lovely, sad, wide-ranging in its learning and mourning, devout without piety, prophetically angry, and most of all, steadfast in love of family and humanity. —Dan Bellm, Practice: A Book of Midrash
Excerpt
Negotiations, I’m confused
and the trade-offs begin:
who’s offering five hostages for
five days of bullets?
A pause in bombing for women,
children, the elderly, not for men?
(Who is Netanyahu, who Hamas?
Do they actually speak)
about the 54 Thai crop-workers
caught in the sudden crossfire?
Almost half the hostages hold foreign
passports from twenty-five countries.
The world watches.
Rifles, munitions, canons, tanks.
(What is the equation?)
Swords into ploughshares
for water, for medicine, for fuel, and
for soldiers’ bodies. (What fuels
the promises?) In the sky’s
flurry, levant’s cast
of sparrowhawks and drones
watching drones, eyes on
the dusty trails of convoys
and caravans, Hagar’s path
and Ishmael’s thirst. For him,
a skin of water when he left,
forsaken. For his cousins,
a snowfall of manna.
Amid the turtledoves’ endless
echo of mourning
now and then a songless angel
in a wake of ailing vultures
who remember herds
of gazelle.
Author
Owen Lewis is the author of four collections of poetry and three chapbooks. Honors include the 2024 E.E.Cummings Prize, the 2023 Guernsey International Poetry Prize, the 2023 Rumi Prize for Poetry, the International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. At Columbia University he is Professor of Psychiatry in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics and teaches Narrative Medicine.
