Happy Everything Is Here—Preorder Today!
It's been a long time coming, but my own pop-culture-steeped first book is finally available for preorder. Take a peek!
She’s Here!
My debut poetry collection, Happy Everything, is now available for preorder! The book hits the shelves on February 5th, and I wanted you to be among the first to know. You’ve already supported my work by subscribing to PopPoetry, and if you like what you’ve been reading here since 2020, I bet you’ll love my full-length book. You can read the title poem—first published by Up North Lit in 2019— if you’re looking for a taste of what to expect.
In some ways, I’ve been working on this book my whole life. In another sense, I started drafting this concept in earnest as part of my doctoral dissertation at The University of North Texas from 2011-2015, during which time I was both married and divorced. But the biggest push to complete the book and bring it into its truest form elapsed between 2016 and 2019: the most profoundly difficult and unhappy period of my life.
I never gave up on the book during this time, even as I spent years watching my friends, colleagues, and graduate cohort publish their books while I racked up 115 rejections as well as dozens of finalist and semifinalist honors in prestigious contests. In 2022, I happened upon Emily Stoddard’s outstanding spreadsheet of poetry publishers that ultimately led me to Cornerstone Press, which acquired Happy Everything and will publish it in February 2024. You can get to know Emily and see her updated publisher spreadsheets on her Substack, Poetry Bulletin:
My long-held dream of publishing books is finally becoming a reality. I persevered, but I also didn’t insist that my book was good enough as it was without reflection: during the years of rejection I kept working on it, kept tweaking and refining it. I asked trusted readers to look at it and kept publishing the poems from the book in literary magazines. The reward for the creative life is the creative life, as Julia Cameron noted, and I wholeheartedly agree. But damn if it doesn’t feel good to have summited this little hill—not for the accolades, but because I truly believe, as Sean Thomas Dougherty wrote, that someone might need the book I wrote as much as the books I needed and read throughout my own life.
So What’s It About?
Happy Everything is a poetry collection set among the dying industries of the Midwest. In these poems, marriage emerges as a damaged institution whose glamorous rituals are beset by horror, chronic pain, class tension, and the grotesqueries of late-stage capitalism. The occasions “celebrated” in Happy poems like “Happy Anniversary,” “Happy Halloween,” and several poems all manically titled “Happy Birthday,” upend the fraught stages of heteronormative romantic marriage and its disintegration. This book is a sharp-tongued Midwestern domestic elegy in the vein of Denise Duhamel’s Blowout, eerily cluttered with the physical trappings of contemporary marriage and pop culture detritus that has dictated our understanding of the relationships between men and women for decades.
This book explodes pop culture forms to critique their misogyny and limitations. A poem about letting a husband win at Jeopardy elapses totally in question-and-answer format; narrative lyrics about the tyranny and consumerism of wedding registries contain visions of Jersey Boys & Cindy Crawford’s iconic mole; concrete poems about shattering I Dream of Jeannie’s pink, plush bottle burst the seams of its actual, womanly shape on the page. As conversations about gender equity continue to evolve in America and around the world, this book attempts to dismantle destructive patriarchal norms that manifest in heteronormative relationships, public spaces, and our cultural imagination. The poems contained in Happy Everything tear down the scenery of the reception hall as they exit. These poems reconsider what it means for women to derive power from the complex sphere of hearth and home in the 21st century.
Where Can I Get My Copy?
You can pre-order Happy Everything from Barnes & Noble or directly from the press. Preorders will be available at Bookshop and Amazon soon!
If you aren’t able to buy the book, you can still support Happy Everything without spending a cent. Here are some ways you can help:
Follow me on social media @caitlin__cowan and help spread the word! I’ll be sharing news and posting about the book frequently.
Request the book at your local library
Recommend the book to other readers
Subscribe to PopPoetry and share this post or other posts… all roads lead to Rome!
I’m grateful for your support! Next week, I’ll be back with a deeper dive into the book and its pop culture references.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for lifting me up and supporting my work in new ways. I hope Happy Everything makes its way into your hands soon.