The Temple of Warm Harmony

The Temple of Warm Harmony is a book of poems, but it is also something of a map. Some of the poems are about the author, some are about the reader, while other poems are about the times we’re all living through. A blend of mini-exorcisms, healing incantations, dreams, and invitations to numinous ways of observing and experiencing life, the book is divided into three parts: In the World of Red Dust, Heartbreak and Armoring, and Entering The Temple of Warm Harmony. On the heels of his award-winning first book of poetry, The School of Soft-Attention, poet Frank LaRue Owen invites “fellow travelers” to consider ways we can regain a sense of harmony even while navigating challenging terrain, personally and collectively.

Frank LaRue Owen of Jackson, Mississippi

Frank LaRue Owen’s poetry is influenced by dreams, the energies of landscape and the seasons, archetypal psychology, the Ch’an/Daoist hermit-poet tradition, and Zen living. He studied for a decade with a Zen woman who—inspired by Ch’an and Daoist tradition—blended silent illumination (meditation), dreamwork, mountain-and-forest spirituality (“landscape practice”), and poetics into a unified path. Owen also studied eco-literature and eco-poetry with the late Jack Collom, a poet and professor in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. His first book of poetry, The School of Soft-Attention, was the winner of the 2017 Homebound Publications Poetry Prize.