<p>The urge to create beauty and be beautiful haunts <em>Happy Everything</em>, Caitlin Cowan's powerful celebration of feminine resilience. The materiality of marriage and divorce abound in the postnuptial ghost stories Cowan tells with no-nonsense, Midwestern frankness and the intimacy of an afterparty conversation in a corner booth. <em>Happy Everything</em> is a deranged wedding registry of various poetic forms which highlight the perverse tenacity of ancestral traumas and the paradoxes inherent to women's relationships with men. These poems are a collage of traditions from a past that women are continually attempting to escape.</p>