She Watered Her Flowers in the Morning by Marsha Owens

In intense and amplifying poems, Marsha Owens ruminates over the repercussions of growing up too soon after losing her mother at a young age. Her adept use of similes is so convincing that the reader hears “a baby hoot owl/ caught in a trap” moaning “like the cold that settles/ around stooped shoulders.” Likewise, her captivating and lyrical images reconstruct the anguish one feels watching a child “dragged across borders” in perilous times. Throughout this debut collection, the self-reflection embodied in these poems offers readers a chance to mull over their own lifelong challenges with the wisdom acquired serving as a key to moving forward.

–Dr. Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda, Virginia Poet Laureate Emerita

Marsha Owens has a poet’s eye and ear, and a willingness to take risks: her work has range. In some poems, she makes her peace with private griefs: “Don’t ask pain to leave. It won’t. /Make friends with it. Invite it in./ Serve wine.” In others, she takes on the global and international news, where “warships lecture each other,” or a judge swears an oath “you know you won’t keep.” While Owens can turn a phrase and craft an image, her language is always at the service of something larger. Even as we admire how the opening line “sun bosses everything today” plunges us into the heat of a Virginia summer, we are alerted to the grass’s “brown patches” and the thirst of “the come-here birds.” And we feel the tug of broader connotations. Soon, without fuss or blame, “we (who) have plenty” have been called to live lives of compassion. Marsha Owens writes with heart, and with smarts, and with lyrical grit. She tells her small, sharp stories as if they were songs.

–Derek Kannemeyer, author of Mutt Spirituals

Marsha Owens’ She Watered Her Flowers in the Morning is a doorway into her world and worldview, unfolding from her own personal encounters with grief to the too-oft grievous state of our sociopolitical landscapes. You can just imagine her standing there at the edge of the sunlight, offering a cup of something cool to the weary reader; from its subtle effervescence, it might be hope. Not to confound grace with softness: the unflinching authenticity of her voice and language both invites and invigorates, welcoming even pain with openness and a glass of wine.

–Joanna Lee, author of Dissections