The Book of Kin is a testament to intentional storytelling. Each essay is perfectly placed within the narrative, pulled together with bouts of humor and reflection. . . .A hopeful exploration of what it means to care for one another, The Book of Kin is honest, entertaining, heart-wrenching, and dripping with empathy.Angie Raney, The Chicago Review of Books
Bowen explores themes of community, solitude and love, meditating on her own experiences as a mother, daughter, and founder of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, the countrys largest prison-based literary organization. Bowens prose is unique and captivating, utilizing knowledge shes gleaned from her career as well as her personal life.Minnesota Womens Press
Bowen writes with such emotional intelligence, beauty, and grace. This book feels like an education, a reckoning, and a guide.Debutiful, Noteworthy Debut Books
"The Book of Kin is an expansive experience, one that, I believe, will be appreciated for its searing and always-seeking approach to tackling large emotions, to wring the secondary colors out of the grander, primary feelings. This book is beautiful, brave, and inventive."Hanif Abdurraquib, author of There's Always This Year
"This work is an exploration of memory and grief, of incarceration and disappointment. It is a record of finding oneself within the ebb and flow and sometimes utter stillness of life. More than a meditation, this is a loving expression of one woman's labor to find clarity alongside us and even on behalf of us. If you listen closely, this is music that sings our lives."Lama Rod Owens, author of The New Saints
Jennifer Eli Bowen invites us to consider what it means to care about othersand to be cared for in return. The Book of Kin is a must-read for anyone asking how we can best find community with those around us, from our families to those imprisoned half a world away.Laura Leigh Morris, author of The Stone Catchers
"It is fitting that a beloved teacher, sensing the artists gifts in a young Jennifer Bowen, launches her on what will become a lifelong quest to answer the question of where love comes from. This extraordinary collection is her answer, a living document that honors her ever-evolving attempts to wrestle honestly with the complexity of what still remains within our power when so much of our story has been marked by the absence of lovewhen it has been warped, withheld, denied, wielded as punishment, or replaced by violence. With prose that marvels from the first sentence to the last, Bowen reminds us of the true root of the word compassion: the rare, yet transcendent ability to hold both tenderness and sorrow, simultaneously."Inara Verzemnieks, author of Among the Living and the Dead
Written with a lyric eye, a probing mind, and an enormous heart, this extraordinary book of essays is both a search and an arrivala quest into the heart of what it means, and requires, to live alongside one another.Lauren Markham, author of The Far Away Brothers
