“With Highlights, Bowlan creates a remarkable ebb and flow that invites an examination of reading itself, long after the chapbook has closed, and the computer has been turned off. Ultimately, Highlights encourages exploration: look at how you’re looking. Now, look again.”
-Erin Vachon, The Anarchist Review of Books
Highlights & Blackouts
My first full poetry collection, Highlights & Blackouts, published in 2023 by _mixlit press, is available online as a codepoem experience. You can also purchase the accompanying chapbook through the website or on Bookshop.org.
About the collection:
Experience memory, art, and selfhood in process. Highlights & Blackouts takes poems full of cityscapes, dirty verve, wonder, and queer longing and carves out a history of shifting perspectives. Written over 15 years and paired with erasures completed years later, this collection interrogates experience and aesthetics with the help of music, images, and videos by the author and a wide circle of artists and friends.
About my writing:
My poetry has been published in New Ohio Review, Gigantic Sequins, Sugar House Review, Four Chambers, Chicago Quarterly Review, Nashville Review, and elsewhere. My criticism and essays have appeared in the Anarchist Review of Books, on the Ploughshares blog and in the anthology Feminisms in Motion, among other publications. I’m the winner of the 4th annual Gigantic Sequins Poetry Contest, a recipient of an Academy of American Poets University Award, and has received fellowships and grants from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Vermont Studio Center. Some examples of my writing available online can be found below.
If you’d like a little inspiration, I maintain a word bank Google sheet to help you get started. Pick 10 words and go.
Work available online
More and Better Trouble (Review for the Anarchist Review of Books)
Ode to Taxidermy (Interim)
Posts written for the Ploughshares blog
Visible Future (Codex)
Dopamax (Gigantic Sequins)
The Human Season (Walter)
A Summer and A Haunted Place (Nashville Review)
Power to the Parents (Utne Reader, republished from make/shift)
