Daniel Bowman Jr.'s first poetry collection is A Plum Tree in Leatherstocking Country (VAC Press, 2012).

His poems have appeared in journals such as The Adirondack Review, American Poetry Journal, Art House America, The Bitter Oleander, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Flourish, Istanbul Literary Review, Main Street Rag, The Midwest Quarterly, The Northern Agrarian, The Other Journal, Pyrta, Rio Grande Review, Seneca Review, Words on Walls Literary Fresco, and others.

Press:

"Daniel Bowman Jr.'s poetry is as American as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and Chief Seattle blended in the prairies and lakes and mountains and the passion of the American spirit, from New York across the wide land. It is always human and it sings splendidly, rich in animistic mystery. I delight in these poems. Bowman has a great big heart and finds himself home in the lyrical brotherhood."

~Emanuel di Pasquale, translator and author of Writing Anew: New and Selected Poems (Bordighera Press, 2007)

"In his first collection of poems, Dan Bowman describes quotidian moments of ordinary life and before you know it, mystery enters and twists everything. One minute we're walking by the canal with the perfectly reasonable goal of getting somewhere gettable, and the next minute the humdrum landscape turns bizarre and we can't figure out where we are. The book is haunted by ancestors and cultural memories and premonitions and ghosts. It captures brilliantly the strangeness of being human. Let these poems stand as a warning and a promise. There's no predicting what will happen: a plum tree is, yes, blossoming in Leatherstocking Country."

~Jeanne Murray Walker, author of New Tracks, Night Falling (William B. Eerdmans, 2009)

Sample poems:

November sits in the cupboard
with the tinfoil and sandwich bags.
It's after dark.
I'm riding in the back seat,
down the back roads.

Some houses are dark.
Some have one light on
and I can't help wondering
who is doing what in that light.

The snow makes me sleepy.
There's a dream:
a woman with plum-black hair-
a bit of a local celebrity-
standing at the sink.
Without looking in the mirror,
she cups her hands,
fills them with warm water.
I am small.
I do a swan dive
from the tip of her nose
into her pool and open my eyes,
floating on the wait.

November straddles plum-black fields.
November waits for me,
its shadows like dreams in the dry stubble.

I'm chasing birds and cats and leaves,
chasing the days.
I'm choosing
Old Testament names;
I'm trailing apostles through Judea,
studying the moves of the Lord Himself.
I'm chasing myself
around the living room.
I'm seeing sleepy projections-
15th-Century Flemish art:
the Merode Altarpiece.
I'm running down baseballs
in the backyard,
searching for a homer
through tinseled trees,
shivering,
spiking at the calves
of long-legged cross-country runners;
I'm playing lost solos
to my best friend's twelve-string-
Brookwood Park.
It's a tag game
and we're still moving-
Herkimer (the bridge), Ilion,
the back roads of Mohawk,
the cemetery,
the candle shop in Utica.
Hunting down day and night themselves,
of course,
and climbing toward big bands:
the elusive bari sax,
the Latin percussion,
the ghosts of nightclub conductors.
I'm riding shotgun
in my brother's LTD,
sinking Cobain
back to the belly,
knowing I'm being chased too,
being run out of my own town
like an outlaw
until finally,
at last,
the body becomes the name,
the words become the body,
the body, the body,
the thousand versions of warmth.