This book is a collaborative work of Ted Goodden's ceramic sculptures and Cornelia Hoogland's poems. Specifically, they are responding through image and text to the 64 hexagrams contained in the ancient book of wisdom, the I Ching, or Book of Changes. Cosmic Bowling's calm weather lands in the midst of twitter storms in which everybody wants to start a conversation. Here's a conversation -- facilitated through visual art and poetry -- that's been going on for three millennia, one that asks the perennial question: How should we live now”

Cornelia Hoogland has published five poetry collections, most recently, Woods Wolf Girl (Wolsak and Wynn, 2011). Her poetry has been published internationally and has been short-listed for the CBC Literary Awards on multiple occasions. Hoogland is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Western Ontario , and is the founder and the co-artistic director of Poetry London, an organization that brings prominent writers into lively discussion with local writers and readers. Hoogland divides her time between London, Ontario, and Hornby Island, BC.

Cornelia Hoogland's profile page

Ted Goodden's profile page

From the I Ching and the small sculptures, poet Cornelia Hoogland created sixty-four six-line poems, six lines to represent the hexagrams: poems that are both personal and collective in how they speak to human experience, to the specifics of her experiences which serve to guide the reader into contemplation. In a way, these are poems with a kind of direct purpose, poems of metaphor and insight.

The Malahat Review

We learn of the refugee and his family, the thinning atmosphere, the tiny wonders of nature close at hand, the hard-won pride in one’s gifts – reading like a poetic journal. Cosmic Bowling is a true Vade Mecum, that you might toss into a bag (along with the I Ching perhaps). We should be grateful for this flowering of their art in these pages.

The Red Alder Review

Both picture book and just-so story, Glory Boy fuses the epic quality of myth with the lyricism of a folk-tale to create a compelling contribution to deep ecology. Here is a dream book with the power to wake you up to the fragile beauty of this world. Ted Goodden's stained glass windows have a rare strength and clarity to “let us see more than we could ourselves, and to bring nature up to us and near to us. David M. Bentley, Western U. Part emotional excavation and part memorial, Trailer Park Elegy is a deeply moving mediation on how to be present when the 'worst has already happened.' An intensely poignant, heart-rending read. Jim Johnstone Hoogland has nailed it in this chilling contemporary re-telling of the age-old tale (Little Red Riding Hood in Woods Wolf Girl). Hoogland makes us see the world from various angles and perspectives, including the wolf's. Layered and smart as hell. Jeanette Lynes

The kaleidoscopic movements of Hoogland’s lines are formally enhanced by her artful caesuras, which make room for surprising shifts. Her crisp and more politically urgent tercets, meanwhile, speak to the contingencies and exigencies that consulting the I Ching can unearth. Climate catastrophe is a frequent topic, notably in the second stanza of “Ta Kuo, Preponderance of the Great”: “The planet’s idling on fumes, a kind of deadly / inertia. We go on being part of the problem. Like Atlas / bearing up the sky, a strained and daily quality. We suffer.” We suffer, “but who would Sisyphus be without his rock,” as a later poem concludes. Hoogland’s Sisyphus analogy is not to us, though, but “the tagged Monarch butterfly,” whose mass migration Hoogland tags as a symbol of perseverance.

Geordie Miller