poetry collections

dancing girl press & studio, 2024




This lush and sensuous modern retelling of the Persephone myth juxtaposes her journey to the underworld with that of the girls who were transformed into winged monsters in the wake of her abduction.








dancing girl press & studio, 2023


From pandemic life to social disintegration, collapsologies explores the costs, emotional and financial, of life in the last decade through the wreckage of horror films, capitalism, class warfare, politics, and tabloid headlines ripped not all that far from the truth.  






dancing girl press & studio, 2022

From the eerie world of 1890's Chicago to strange apocalyptic landscapes, AUTOMAGIC builds an intricate Victorian dollhouse full of fraudulent fortune tellers, overconfident hucksters, unhappy housewives, and ghosts of a violent past that still lingers.




dancing girl press & studio, 2022


What does it mean to be an artist in a world full of monsters?  What does it mean to be the monster?
This collection rifles through dusty museum halls and neglected cabinet drawers to get at the nature of art and creation in the face of danger--to the body, the heart, to the earth---and how art can both save us and destroy us at the same time.  






dancing girl press & studio, 2021


Set amidst the drift and sway of midwestern girlhood, this collection of prose poems & lyric essay tongues the edges of the rural and suburban gothic, urban legends, sleepover lore, horror movies, and the darker corners of feminine consciousness. 




dancing girl press & studio, 2021

This new collection hovers in the tension between mothers and daughters. The ghost of each that inhabits the other. The body that hungers and sustains. From a starving Gretel to mothers to strange imaginary children  the speakers explore the body as memory.  As prison.  As key. 







sex & violence
Black Lawrence Press, 2020
ISBN:  978-1-62557-813-6


"Bowen is a poet on fire the way that Dali’s giraffes are on fire, the way our overheated Earth is on fire, the way Sylvia Plath was on fire the year before her suicide. Her poems happen in a time when “men continue to do terrible things to women,” and yet women are poets with magical and persistent powers."  -Devon Balwit






little apocalypse
dancing girl press & studio, 2020
(E-Book)





"I was doe-eyed, dolled-up, and standing in the center of a ring of ponies when it came for me, the circle collapsing inward with the weight of its own emptiness. " - from apocalypse theory:  a reader



salvage
Black Lawrence Press, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62557-947-8


"With her knack for marrying the disparate with the savvy, the corporeal with the fragile, Bowen breathes life into creatures both familiar and fantasmic. These poems are drenched with imagery so vivid that they seem to breathe and ache, and the menagerie so real that I half-expected to find fur stuck to every page." -Sina Evans












major characters in minor films
(Sundress Publications, 2015)
ISBN:  978-1939675194





"In Kristy Bowen's major characters in minor films, language moves like a camera, cutting from image to image, leaving impressions that form intriguing fragmented narratives of love, intrigue, mystery and damage. Populated with both the familiar and the strange, with rabbits and birds as well as whiskey and fire, the journey through the scenes these poems create is a wild and rich ride."-Donna Vorreyer











Black Lawrence Press, 2014)
ISBN: 978-1-937854-93-5



"These gorgeous lyrics document dangerous histories, the marginalia that matters most. Bowen’s dreamy, eerie poems create a subversively gothic landscape: “mile after mile of busted / lunchboxes glinting in the sun.” --Carol Guess















Noctuary Press, 2013
ISBN: 978-0988805194




"Fairy tales haven't always been happy, and Bowen is reminding her readers this by digging up the darker roots. The outdoors cannot be fenced in." -Heavy Feather Review









 in the bird museum
(Dusie Press, 2008)
ISBN: 9780615256863



"These poems let us know pleasure and danger are often in close proximity. These poems are inhabited by girls and women who move through the world with a sense of urgency, and Bowen invites us to join them. Or rather, she INSISTS we do. This book is delicious."  -Susan Denning












Ghost Road Press, 2006
ISBN 0-9778034-9-X


"Bowen's poems are about what exists in the periphery. Beyond the lovely delicacy of stockings, rice paper, Shalimar, yellow dresses and tortoiseshell combs, there is famine and loss, desire and rot. When reading Bowen, one experiences an unraveling sensation that sidles into the nervous system, generating the shakes...."  -Simone Muench