A Bright Forgetting

The poems of A Bright Forgetting tell Bowman's journey of care for her aging parents, as she remembers them and her family. It is an exploration of how to say goodbye. It is an elegy for what her parents and grandparents built, and what was torn and is tearing, and how that fragmentation is simply about being human: that all our lives are synapses firing bright with memories, reflections, and beauty despite the pain of this transient, firefly life.

Lynne Martin Bowman received Honorable Mention in Finishing Line Press's New Women's Voices Chapbook Contest for A Bright Forgetting. She was the winner of The Comstock Review's Jessie Bryce Niles National Chapbook Contest for her chapbook, Water Never Sleeps. She won 2nd place for the Crab Orchard Review's Poetry Prize. In addition, she was The Sonora Review's Poetry Prize Winner, twice received Honorable Mention in the Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition, and was twice an Emily Dickinson Award finalist. Her work has appeared in the Southern Poetry Review, The Mississippi Review, and the International Poetry Review, among others. She has a PhD in English from UNC-Greensboro with a Dissertation on the Poet Robert Bly. She lives in Greensboro, NC with her husband, two rescued dogs and one rescued cat.