Owen Lewis, A PRAYER OF SIX WINGS

Totally Booked with Zibby

Zibby Owens

Parenting, Books, Literary, Moms, Arts, Connection, Entertainment, Reading, Inspiration

4.5 • 643 Ratings

🗓️ 25 April 2025

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Zibby interviews award-winning poet and psychiatrist Owen Lewis about A PRAYER OF SIX WINGS, a masterful, moving, and timely collection written in the wake of the October 7th attacks in Israel. Owen reflects on the heartbreak of watching global antisemitism resurge, the personal anguish of having family in Israel, and the urgent need to record this moment through poetry. He and Zibby talk about how, interwoven with headlines, personal stories, and lyrical snapshots of grief and resilience, Owen’s poems bear witness to a year of trauma and hope.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, this is Zibi Owens, and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby. Formerly, moms don't have time to read books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest, best-selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators, whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive
0:24.0	look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't
0:29.3	have to.
0:30.3	Stay in the know, get insider insights, and connect with guests like I do every single day.
0:36.2	For more information, go to zibbimedia.com and follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens.
0:44.5	Owen Lewis is the author of A Prayer of Six Wings.
0:48.6	Owen is the author of four collections of poetry and three chapbooks.
0:52.4	Honors include the 2024 E.E. Cummings Prize, the 2023
0:56.3	Guernsey International Poetry Prize, the 2023 Rumi Prize for Poetry, the International
1:02.4	Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, and the Gene Pedrick Chatbook Award.
1:08.4	At Columbia University, he is a professor of psychiatry and the Department
1:11.4	of Medical Humanities and Ethics and teaches narrative medicine. Welcome, Owen. Thank you so much for
1:16.7	coming and totally booked with Zivie to talk about your beautiful poetry collection, a prayer of
1:22.7	six wings, which is so beautiful and so moving. Congratulations.
1:29.5	Thank you so much. Thank you.
1:36.7	Why don't you give an overview of this beautiful, slim, poignant collection?
1:45.0	Okay. Well, as so many Jews worldwide, October 7th hit all of us. And, you know, the overtones to the Shoah were haunting for most of us.
1:52.0	On top of that, my personal story is complicated by having a daughter who lives in Israel, two grandchildren then, three now, thank God.
2:06.0	And so it's a new level of worry when you have close family, although everyone, all 1,200, murdered that day, felt like family.
2:22.3	So in many ways, the book kind of blew through me.
2:26.6	I can tell you how I found my hook into it, but it both blew through me and kept me together for that year of very intense worrying
2:38.2	and often not knowing what to do with your worry, then compounded by how quickly the world
	...

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