Owen Floyd has been a social worker for the State of Arkansas Office on Aging, a paralegal at a Legal Services office in domestic relations and administrative law, a bounced-around bureaucrat who evolved into an Appeals Referee for unemployment claims and finally a Hearing Officer for Disability Determination for Social Security. He has a BA from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, double major in English and Philosophy.
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“Most people—just about everyone except depressives themselves—seem to think depression is a one-dimensional, monotonous condition: you just feel “down in the dumps” all the time. Some even talk about anxiety as if it is the opposite of depression when it is nothing more than depression about the future. And many people accuse depressives of being woefully self-absorbed when they are actually highly empathetic toward others. Owen Floyd’s poems are anything but self-absorbed—he writes about himself, sure, but he also writes about his wife, friends, neighbors, doctors, convicts on death row, public defenders, a man with a transplanted heart, a woman whose face was disfigured in a house fire, and blind people dancing—and the poems are far from one-dimensional in mood, tone, or style—they range from heart-breaking sadness, suicidal desperation, and inspirational elegies to sexual fantasies, aphoristic wisdom, startling metaphors and wordplay, witty humor, and satire. There’s even a sadly whimsical poem called “P-O-L-I-O” that you can sing to the tune of the classic childhood song about a dog whose “name-o” was “B-I-N-G-O.” In short, you couldn’t ask for a more comprehensive guide to the varied, ever-shifting terrain of depression. And Floyd’s poems not only parse depression for those who don’t fully understand it, they provide powerful examples of one way to exorcize it, if only temporarily: by writing with utter honesty and directness about it. As he says in one of his poems, “Some of these poems / Occasionally help me.” But again, he’s anything but self-absorbed, for he adds, “And perhaps another. / Perhaps you.”
David Jauss, Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing, University of Arkansas-Little Rock Author of Improvising Rivers and You Are Not Here
“These poems are / Me and not me,” Owen Floyd states in his ambitious debut collection, Confess Depressed. And indeed, the poems grapple with the multiple facets of living in the fractured modern world. In confessional tone, Floyd describes the myriad painful aspects of the human condition—mental illness, grief, regret—while also finding room for awe, absurdity, even, at times, humor. Reminiscent of confessional poets of the mid-20th century, Floyd weaves biographical detail into his verse, crafting a poetry/creative nonfiction hybrid but with a consistent awareness of the role of persona in art. Floyd’s speaker (is there one throughout or many? this question lies at the heart of the collection) often references the poems, the reader, even the speaker-voice directly, declaring in one, “This poem is / Honest Owen.” The quest for honesty, and the exploration of what “honesty” can mean in art and memory, emerges as the driving force of the poems in this collection.
Mary Sharpe. Associate professor of English at Arkansas Tech University