NCWN

Water Never Sleeps by Lynne Martin Bowman

Publisher: Comstock Review

ISBN: 978-0-9747790-4-1 

Price: $12

Ordering Information: www.comstockreview.org

As this marvelous collection of poetic reflections inspired by the sonnets of Petrarch unfolds, you will recognize craft at its best.

Bowman notes that “most of the poems in Water Never Sleeps were a direct result of my caring for my parents in the last years of their lives.  I felt very lucky to have them close to me, after years of living in different states.   It was a time where I could give back to them, and was able to really hear the wisdom they had to share.” According to National Book Award Nominee poet, Sarah Lindsay, “A river runs through these graceful poems– quiet, powerful...freighted with prerequisites for grief: history and love.” 

Lynne Martin Bowman of Greensboro, NC is the 2009 winner of The Comstock Review’s Jessie Bryce Niles Chapbook Competition.  Being released in January, 2011, the chapbook, Water Never Sleeps, was selected from hundreds of manuscripts submitted.  Poet Fred Chappell calls these lyric poems about aging and care-giving “a sequence of poems that for all its exhilarant beauty never turns away from the facts…A strong achievement, tenderly set forth.”  A Sonora Review poetry prize winner, Bowman has had poems in The Southern Poetry Review, The Mississippi Review, Tar River Poetry, International Poetry Review, Petroglyph, and many others. Additionally, she has been short listed for the Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition and the Emily Dickinson Award.  She won second prize in the NC Writers’ Network Campbell Chapbook Competition in 2008.  This is The Comstock Review’s fourth chapbook contest, in which the winner receives $1000 in prize money and 50 copies of the chapbook.