Like a man who might go fishing as a diversion only to catch somethingextraordinary, maybe Gary L. McDowell didn't set out to write a big fat hymnto the human condition. But he did. The brilliant American Amen wrestles, body and spirit, with our belligerent world. It's a tensile poetic line McDowellcasts, in the many senses of the word: this poetry throws, sheds, exhales, reckons, sows, shapes, bestows. Part gristle, part faith, American Amen is abeautiful book, reeling in "something baffling about adulthood" as it glintsand flexes, alive, into the air.- Amy NewmanGary L. McDowell's poems shimmer with masterful variety-long sinuoussequences and short intensifying lyrics; personal narratives and prayers tosteel, wheat, and corn; family poems, of a father and of a son, yet poemscapable of rich otherness: "I found my history in the tiny / bones of ahummingbird." For all this productive range, the center of McDowell'simpressive first book, American Amen, is love, whose abiding act is acceptance.That's what the word amen means-whether in Jewish, Muslim, or Christianusage-and that's the deepest gift among the many gifts of these poems. Ashe writes himself, out of loss and gain, out of terror and awe, after all, "incase of fire, any god will do."- David BakerIn this age of new-didacticism a reader of poetry might sometimes wish toask poetry to delight first, then worry about instructing. Gary L. McDowell'sAmerican Amen does just that, line by gravid line, one dazzling momentafter another, in poems that are wholly true. A romance of place andperson continually undergoes scrutiny and comes out from disillusionmentto wonder, manifold mysteries, and joy-honest, stunned, self-forgetfulglimpses of the illimitable. An unsettling yet steadfast vision obtains, of origin, longing, creation, and departure-all revealed as inevitable yetunpredictable forces of grace. This is an astonishing collection, a poetry ofresoundingly human and natural marvels.- William OlsenAmerican Amen is a moving and remarkably mature debut. In it one finds aMidwestern Robert Hass-impeccably tuned to birdsong, the whisperingtrees, the erotic and broken heartbeat of the every day. The collectionwrestles the unbeatable ghosts of family and manhood; what kind of manam I, these poems ask, What does love mean? Hiking through a forest offamilial apparitions the poems yearn to understand fathers and grandfathers.In gutting a fish they can find the sublime. Gary L. McDowell's bigshoulderedpoems house both self-doubt and a bottomless well of kindness.American Amen wondrously pushes into the dark with "its heart in its fists."- Alex Lemon