Blending humor with pathos, The Pugilist's Daughter illuminates some of the complications inherent in a fateful family position as the daughter most emotionally enmeshed with a wayward father. Some of the poems like "First Night," "How Insomnia Runs Through a Bloodline," "Black Pearl," and the titular poem portray a childhood and youth scarred by sorrow and loss, while others, such as "Story," "It Was Like This," and "Vigil" trace some of the steps and missteps taken to unravel the Gordian knot characteristic of this position within an "electric" constellation. Buoyed by humor, blunt charm, and the desperate pursuit of serenity in impossible situation, Lowery's account charts a narrow path out of dangerous waters in poems such as "After My Seventh Christmas," "At Mass," "Greensfield Park, North Side, Age Thirteen," and "Childlike."
A native of Central New York State-where she still spends part of her summers-Lowery sets most of the poems in the small industrial town of Johnson City, NY, or in her father's birthplace of Syracuse. Additionally, some poems refer to Texas, where the poet's father lived for a few years, held, as he phrased it "an economic hostage." The poet has lived in Texas and taught literature and creative writing full time for many years in the English Department at the University of St. Thomas in Houston.
This collection is the tip of the iceberg in what the poet hopes will be a full collection of poetry coming out in the next few years. Three of the poems in this collection ("It Was Like This," "A Man Takes a Drink, A Drink Takes a Drink, A Drink Takes a Man," and "I Never Said,") were first "made public" in Lowery's play A Heroine Free Summer, given an equity production in Houston by Mildred's Umbrella Theater Company in the spring of 2017. The California Quarterly (defunct for decades now) published "Married Off" as "Married," in one of its last issues, and "How Insomnia Runs Through a Bloodline" is forthcoming from Texas 7, (TACWT Proceedings).
She wrote some of the earliest poems in this collection under the tutelage of poet Ruth Stone, her mentor and PhD dissertation director, at Binghamton University. Lowery's work has been influenced by the poetry of Sharon Olds, Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Bishop and many others. If she could write like Wallace Stevens, she would.
A poet and a playwright, Janet Lowery has been published in many reviews and anthologies and in an earlier chapbook from Wings Press, Thin Dimes. Her trilogy of plays calling attention to human trafficking, Traffic in Women, was produced in 2006, 07, 08 at the University of St. Thomas in Houston and spawned a book of dramatic monologues by the same name (Odonata House, 2008). Her play about the opioid epidemic, A Heroine-Free Summer, was given an equity production by Mildred's Umbrella Theater Company in Houston, 2017. She edited a collection of poetry chiefly about the Texas dancehall tradition, By the Light of a Neon Moon, in 2019 for Madville Publishing.
