In Broken Waters, poet Amy Bornman navigates the uncharted territory of a first pregnancy and an unfurling crisis of faith by turning to confessional poetry and the text of the Bible in alternating turns. By following themes of fertility and birth in the Bible, Bornman finds a deep and wide guide through unfathomable change, responsibility, and love. As ancient mothers affirm and challenge her embodied experience, Bornman stands in the tension of all that shifts around her — global pandemic, climate crisis, marriage, friendship, body, faith, and fear. Broken Waters is a bold and bewildered prayer, and a raw shout on the edge of new motherhood. “I think I want to be transformed.”

Broken Waters

introducing Amy’s second full length poetry collection,

Fernwood Press, 2024
Paperback, 128 pages

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Praise for Broken Waters

  • Amy Bornman's poems pierce through, raw and mystical; they are what I wanted to read when I was pregnant with my first baby. Even now they provide me a balm and poetic wrestle, a dialogue between the self, with the mysterious body and soul that dwells in the womb, and a cloud of biblical women who have journeyed through the blood and beauty of motherhood. These poems peel back and reveal the glory and terror, the sacred and mundane, a mother's cry and prayer. Broken Waters is a kind of examination of conscience and a blessing.

    Jess Sweeney, cofounder of Wellspring: A Mother Artist Project and director of the Collegium Institute's Arts Initiative

  • Penned during the COVID-19 pandemic, Bornman's poetry exudes a wisdom drawn from introspection and solitude that is reminiscent of Emily Dickinson's. Bornman's poetry reveals what readers of scripture should have seen all along: motherhood is central to the biblical narrative. She draws upon Biblical imagery-water and fire, bleeding and cleansing, birth and crucifixion-to audaciously poeticize her own experience as a mother through her pregnancy, labor, and the birth of her first child. By narrating her own maternal experiences alongside those of biblical mothers, Bornman invites the reader to experience a sacred history of motherhood. To read these poems is to intimately experience the mind and body of a mother: beginning and ending, inside and outside, birthing and dying. After reading this collection, I feel even more fully that scripture is for me, is about me, as a woman, a child, and a mother.

    Alison Gibson, Senior Lecturer of English and Director of First-Year Writing and the Writing Center at Wheaton College

  • My oldest was born over eleven years ago, but Amy Bornman brought back the exquisitely excruciating details of those months of pregnancy with this beautiful book of poetry. From the days of longing for a pregnancy ("I think I want to be transformed") to the delivery room ("my body/ will be broken and your body/ will be whole and we'll go out/ together to see what remains") Amy walks through each week of pregnancy ("I've never kept time in weeks before") with such care and intention ("you are a fact in me"). Interspersed are searing views of biblical women like Leah ("I think/ they're the best children/ in this terrible world") and Noah's wife ("why am I on this ark?") written as you've never read them before. As a reader, you will remember your own experiences or perhaps gain a clearer glimpse of what your friend, your partner, your family has felt in these isolating months of transformation. "I will die in a thousand tiny ways, having met you/ on earth where we don't know anything." This book is the diary I didn't keep during my own pregnancies, and I am grateful to have read it.

    Joann Renee Boswell, author of Meta-Verse!: it's going to be interesting to see how yesterday goes (Fernwood Press, 2023)