Chosen by RDP founder Scott King “for its voice and for its reverent treatment of place and labor,” Empty-Handed won the press’s Emergence Chapbook Prize in 2013. This expanded second edition preserves King’s original spare design, while seven additional poems widen the book’s narrative arc, weaving together indelible episodes of early jobs, family bonds, and learning experiences in unexpected places.

Lowery’s language is musical and emotionally charged throughout, perhaps especially in those poems that explore father-son relationships. The book’s field-of-view also encompasses stray bits of Americana: a New England chair factory, an indigenous petroglyph in the Sonoran Desert, blues legend Howlin’ Wolf in performance, a box of 1950s Cuban cigars.

“‘Poetry is news that stays news,’ Ezra Pound’s famous aphorism applies to Scott Lowery’s chapbook of 23 poems, Empty-Handed. The poetry is dewdrop-fresh and rich with ‘brief, vivid particulars’. Lowery’s style is both musical and muscular, combining reverence with down-to-earth subject matter. He writes lyrically with an elegiac undertone, about the magnificent out-of-doors––hiking, canoeing––as well as the intimacy of deep ties with his father and the excruciating loss of his brother. Lowery describes physical labor and laborers with precise, powerful images such as ‘this solder-flecked workbench, / how the hot lead bubbles and waits.’ Lowery shows knowledge and respect for those who teach practical lessons: how to repair a bike, sweep a room, or remain patient and kind in the face of difficulties. Having these poems in my hands filled me with gratitude.”
—Margaret Hasse, poet, author of Summoned, The Call of Glacier Park, and others

“These poems of first family and found family, neighbors and strangers, unfold in ‘sharp-edged lines and loose turns,’ even as they gallop with lyrical music. By Scott Lowery’s skilled hand, Empty-Handed is as clear and fathomless as the moments and conversations he returns to in order to bring forth these tales of time and place and people. Empty-Handed yields rich treasure. It’s like an instruction manual for going back, for how to remember, for the way love can endure in memories.”
—Michael Kleber-Diggs, poet, author of Worldly Things, Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize

“Say you have a next-door neighbor, who is your trusted confidante. He is intelligent, an attentive listener with acute powers of observation, a musician and writer. All these talents and abilities come out in his poetry, which is always pitch-perfect and quietly oracular. Scott Lowery is this neighbor. If you listen carefully to the silent music of the poems in Empty-Handed, you’ll hear a latter-day Roethke, but without the bombast—the lyricism woven more subtly throughout the poems. We experience the blue-collar underpinnings of his vision and how that influenced the direction of his teaching career. He has suffered his share of losses, and those narratives are sketched with quiet frankness and compassion. Scott has both feet on the ground—many of the poems show him finding his way through deep immersion in the natural world. Considering this collection alongside Mutual Life, a second chapbook-length suite of powerful politically engaged poems, I predict that we are witnessing a career on the verge of national readership and recognition.”
—Ken McCullough, poet and translator, author of Dark Stars and Broken Gates

“Scott Lowery’s chapbook, Empty-Handed, is both tough-minded and open-hearted. In these 23 poems sparked by family connections, his language is at once gritty and lyrical, level-headed and precise but filled with feeling. Whether evoking urban, industrial landscapes, the contours of home, or the contrasts of the natural world, Lowery’s craft is unfailingly deft and memorable.”
—Leslie Schultz, poet and photographer, author of Cloud Song, Concertina, and Still Life with Poppies: Elegies