Knock-knock! Who’s there?

Ultimately for all, it will be age. At first, it seems like a bad joke—needing a cane, memory loss, more care, forgetting even one’s own name. In Knock-knock, Lewis creates the persona of an older physician who should’ve known what’s in store. Sometimes the reality is grim, but there’s humor, love, and even romance in his inventive and poetic story-telling. “Lost-and-found / is not a planned / destination.” Yet we all eventually find ourselves there.

Praise

“Old age is no joke. The body breaks down; the mind wanders away. For many, if not most, aging is existentially challenging and physically demeaning. And yet Owen Lewis’ Knock-knock finds a variety of entry points into this penultimate human experience. The eighteen poems (in the numerology of the Kabbalah, life) gathered here range from mild ruminations on the disconcerting experience of loosing and forgetting inconsequential things, to more intense poems, exploring critical conditions: impaired ambulation, deterioration of vision, cardiac failures. Like all good healthcare providers, Lewis – a medical doctor, himself – is always writing toward the fear of mortality that lies at the heart of aging, and that frightens most of us, nearly to death. Through poetic storytelling, deep empathy, psychological courage, and a gimlet eye, he finds both solace and meaning (and yes: sometimes humor) in this phase of life.” —Kate Daniels

“Knock-knock is a sophisticated chapbook about aging and the brain by a prize-winning poet and professor of psychiatry. The poems come to the reader in a variety of shapes, moods and sounds. The book opens with the speaker’s tender first encounters with such age-related issues as the use of a cane for mobility and the occasional challenges of memory. Music is an important element (and subject) in the subsequent poems about more serious symptoms and the fears they inspire. Only a clinical expert in diseases of the mind could have constructed the drama of the scenes that follow.” —Michael Salcman

Reviews and Press

Colin Harington’s review of Knock-knock. ‘In Praise of…’Knock-knock by Owen Lewis on Ink, Sweat & Tears, April 8, 2024.

Dennis Daly’s review of Knock-knock on Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene, March 22, 2024.

The Lehrhaus, Two Poems from Knock-knock, February 12, 2024.