All hardcover and paperback books purchased through this website will be signed by author Robert McDowell.
Read All Reviews“In the way that Rumi allowed us to touch the heart of our soul, Robert McDowell—with a lyrical grace—shows you how to easily create poetry that can propel your spiritual journey beyond normal reality into cherished mystic realms.”
—Denise Linn, author of Sacred Space and The Secret Language of Signs (see more reviews …)
Hardcover & Paperback Books
Sweet Wolf: Selected & New Poems
Homestead Lighthouse Press | Hardcover, $24.95
Homestead Lighthouse Press | Paperback, $16.95
Featuring 100+ new and selected poems spanning Robert McDowell’s four-decade writing career, Sweet Wolf has been described as “achingly human,” “brilliantly insightful,” “utterly original,” and “dazzling!”
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Emily & Virginia: A Novel
Homestead Lighthouse Press | Hardcover, $26.95
Homestead Lighthouse Press | Paperback, $16.95
A literary time-travel fantasy set in the present-day, Emily & Virginia: A Novel brings Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf together at last. Critics call the magical realism novel “a rollicking journey through time and space”; “a fantasy so real you can taste it”; and “deeply intelligent, devoted, poetic, and timeless.”
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Poetry As Spiritual Practice: Reading, Writing, and Using Poetry in Your Daily Rituals, Aspirations, and Intentions (Nautilus Book Award Winner)
Free Press/Simon & Schuster | Hardcover, $20.00
Poetry is the language of devotion in prayer, chant, and song. Reading and writing poetry creates clarity, deepens and expands spiritual inquiry, and cultivates wisdom, compassion, self-confidence, patience, and love. In author Robert McDowell’s words, poetry makes you into a tuning fork of the Divine.
The World Next to This One
Salmon Publishing, Ireland | Paperback, $20.00
McDowell’s fourth full-length collection of poems, The World Next to This One was published in Ireland by Salmon Publishing. Lyrics and narratives—including the stand-out “All I Took with the Sun”—originally appeared in The Hudson Review. The collection follows the arc of an immigrant Japanese family surviving relocation camps and farming in the Northwest.
The More We Get Together: The Sexual and Spiritual Language of Love
Poiesis Press | Hardcover, $20.00
The More We Get Together is a blueprint for communication, whether we’re looking to speak more gently to our friends, more compassionately to our coworkers, or more romantically to our lovers, the writing and speaking goals we learn throughout this book bring us closer, more in tune with our fellow travelers in a complicated world.
On Foot, in Flames
Pitt Poetry Series | Paperback, $12.95
Published in 2002, McDowell’s third full-length poetry collection “appeal[s] to grace in part as a response to violence” (Publishers Weekly). “The longest poem, ‘The Pact,’ a slightly ghoulish story of rural adultery, shows McDowell venturing artfully on the terrain of the dour twentieth-century narrative master, Robinson Jeffers. Very impressive” (Ray Olson, Booklist).
The Diviners (a Book-Length Poem)
Peterloo Poets, England | Paperback, $10.00
This book-length poem chronicles a family’s experience from the 1950s through the 1990s. The 1950s section was selected by Donald Hall for inclusion in the Best American Poetry series.
Buy PaperbackThe Reaper Essays
With Mark Jarman | Story Line Press | Paperback, $15.00
These satirical, hard-hitting, and controversial essays about poetry, poets, and critics were written by Mark Jarman and Robert McDowell for their literary magazine, The Reaper.
Buy PaperbackHow I Came to Know Fish (by Ota Pavel)
Stories Translated from Czech with Jindriska Badal
Story Line Press | Hardcover, $25.00
Penguin Eastern European Classics | Paperback, $17.00
How I Came to Know Fish is Jindriska Badal’s and Robert McDowell’s much praised translation of Ota Pavel’s stories about the extermination of most of his family during World War II. Pavel also writes eloquently about the bond fishing created between the author as a boy and his departed elders. Poignant!
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One-Man Boat: The George Hitchcock Reader
Joseph Bednarik, Mark Jarman, and Robert McDowell, Editors | Story Line Press | Paperback, $15.00
With Joseph Bednarik and Mark Jarman, McDowell edits the poetry, stories, drama, and satirical social commentary of poet, painter, sculptor, actor, teacher, novelist, and playwright George Hitchcock.
Buy PaperbackPoetry After Modernism
Editor | Story Line Press | Hardcover, $25.00 | Paperback, $16.00
Edited by McDowell, this anthology includes virtually all of the then-young poet-critics who made names for themselves beginning in the 1980s. The goal was to consider poetry in the greater context of culture, spirituality, politics, and gender.
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Quiet Money
Henry Holt & Company | Paperback, $15.00
The poet’s first full-length collection, Quiet Money consists almost exclusively of longer narrative poems, including the title poem about a bootlegger/pilot who flew the Atlantic solo before Charles Lindbergh. This piece is often cited as one of the most important poems of the 1980s and the movement to revive storytelling in verse.
Buy PaperbackSound and Form in Modern Poetry
With Harvey Gross | University of Michigan Press | Paperback, $25.00
McDowell has updated this classic text. Segments on Dickinson, Robinson, Frost, Jeffers, and Lowell, among other poets, have been greatly expanded while Ashbery, Creeley, Ginsberg, Hall, Kees, Kumin, Levertov, Levine, O’Hara, Plath, Rich, Simpson, and Wilbur have been added, among others. The epilogue discusses a new generation of poets whose works will likely be read well into the twenty-first century.
Buy PaperbackCowboy Poetry Matters: From Abilene to the Mainstream, Contemporary Cowboy Writing
Story Line Press | Paperback, $20.00
Called by many the best anthology of its kind ever compiled, Cowboy Poetry Matters includes poetry and prose by many of the leading cowboy and cowgirl writers. Appropriate mainstream writers also appear. There is special emphasis on writing by Western women.
Buy PaperbackThe Pact (a Long Poem)
Special Edition | Aralia Press | Hardcover, $75.00
The Pact is a limited edition printing of one of the poet’s most renowned works. A slightly ghoulish story of rural adultery, “‘The Pact,’ a slightly ghoulish story of rural adultery, shows McDowell venturing artfully on the terrain of the dour twentieth-century narrative master, Robinson Jeffers. Very impressive” (Ray Olson, Booklist). Should also be of interest to collectors of Aralia Press books and fine press books in general.
At the House of the Tin Man
Limited Edition Chapbook | The Chowder Press | Paperback, $100.00
McDowell’s first publication, this chapbook of poems was selected for publication by Chowder Press Editor Ron Slate. These poems, many of them the poet’s first narratives, are set in the Mojave Desert and feature an array of unforgettable characters.
Buy PaperbackE-Books
Change Writer’s Block to Writer’s Stock You Can Take to the Bank: 10 Steps to Curing Writer’s Block Forever
E-Book, $3.95
You have a story to tell, a poem or memoir or essay to write, but you just can’t get started. Every writer and would-be writer knows this scenario only too well. Poet Robert McDowell rides to the rescue with this readable and enjoyable guide to banishing writer’s block forever.
Sonnets: How to Write Them in Minutes
E-Book, $2.99
The favored poetry form of Shakespeare comes to modern life for all writers in this splendid guide. McDowell’s examples and exercises effortlessly lead the reader/writer into the intricacies of the English, Italian, and Spenserian sonnets to original compositions. This book is informative and fun.
Haiku: How to Write It in Minutes
E-Book, $2.99
Haiku is fun to write and inspires communal transactions. Award-winning poet and teacher Robert McDowell provides a succinct introduction and playful exercises—perfect keys to the composition of this timeless poetry form from Japan.
Before I Pray: A Kevin Killgallen Mystery
E-Book, $4.95
Just for fun! Before I Pray introduces an evolving, gritty hero, Los Angeles private investigator Kevin Killgallen, who even as he seeks equanimity and meaning must come to terms with the greatest losses and violence of his life. Before I Pray is a fast-paced, evocative, character-driven mystery that delivers the goods. It’s a knockout!
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