Picture of Nobody by Philip Owens. McNally Editions, 288 pages. 2026. “It’s literature that counts,” one character states early on in Picture of Nobody . To which another replies: “So does my landlady.” This little aperçu sums up the tension that occupies the entire novel. Unless a poet is lucky enough to be born with money—like Sidney, Cavendish, Shelley, or Milton—they must find a way to simultaneously square their accounts with literature and their landlady. This balancing act would’ve been familiar to the novel’s author, Philip Owens. In 1931, the editor Samuel Putnam published European Caravan, an anthology meant to introduce American readers to the “after-War” writers who were contending with the “spiritual chaos” and “breakdown of reality” brought about by the Great War—to literary modernism, in other words. The anthology included Beckett, Woolf, Lawrence, Eliot, Auden, Lorca, and others. It also included many who would not go on to become household names.…