Katie Ellen Bowers writes poems with dirt under her nails. The earthiness and authenticity of her words are almost fragrant with heat, salt, skin, leaves, and tangibility. Unflinchingly, Bowers guides us through womanhood, motherhood, and humanhood. Her poems are honest about the burdens of love and memory, about the simple blessings that bloom sacred throughout the quiet corners of our lives. She is one of my favorite voices in contemporary American poetry. - Nicholas Trandahl, award-winning author of Mountain Song and All the Color, All the Wind

Katie Ellen Bowers’ poems arise first from the shame that women heap upon other women, from sins and imperfections both real and imagined, and finally from the passions of being a wife and mother. All along the way, Bowers finds the elusive voice so often hidden within the body, knowing all along that Whitman was absolutely right when he said, “these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul.” -Denton Loving, author of Crimes Against Birds & Tamp

From fig trees and fern-green to strawberry cakes and bathtubs, these poems ask the reader to reconsider what makes a space sacred. Can a woman ever truly feel safe in her own body? With needle-sharp attention to detail and lyric prowess, Bowers shows us poems that are shedding their skins, transforming, reaching up for the sun. We learn how beauty and decay can co-exist, how to make the body holy again. - Megan Denton

The poems in Katie Ellen Bowers’ debut collection, This Earthly Body, are both sensual and sensory with a raw honesty that never wavers. The earthly body is the poet’s own physical, emotional, and spiritual layers, as well as the fertile, living orb we inhabit. Bowers’ intimate connection with each renders this reader believing her observation in the title poem, “It is hard for me/ to imagine something better than my/ daughter resting her head in my lap/ as she reads me the story she has written,/ the crow’s feet in the corners of my/ husband’s eyes when he laughs, or the/ crisp sweetness of a good apple.”  - Kim Blum-Hyclak