The Kansas City Star poetry reviewer Kathleen Johnston named Standing on the Edge of the World as one of the 10 most noteworthy poetry books of 2008.

The following is a review by Victoria Carroll:

From Flint Hills Review (Emporia State University): Issue Thirteen: 126-129, 2008.

Review: Martin-Bowen, Lindsey. Standing on the Edge of the World.
Topeka: Woodley Memorial Press, 2008. $10.00, paper.

Lindsey Martin-Bowen uses a descriptive lyric voice, vivid imagery, and interesting personas to generate a sense of place and to transport the reader into those places like Caribou Hill or Copper Mountain, Colorado; Bath, England; or Victoria, Kansas. Her effective repetition of sounds, words, images, and ideas creates unique rhythms and establishes connections among the poems. Written over a period of some 25 years or so, this collection presents many intense and insightful glimpses into a changing reality, altered perceptions, and the “yearn[ing] for something eternal.”
In “Periwinkle Park,” Martin-Bowen’s sharp imagery draws the reader into a park of ponderosa pines that is as “green as Iraq TV scenes/shot at night in war zones.” The smell of “bleached logpoles” and the sound of a buzzing fly that “interrupts the creek’s high-pitched/refrain” create a surreal sense of place, so that when we read, “Clouds roil into battalions—/they cover the skies./I think we read of Armageddon,” we are prepared for a storm. What we get, though, is not an immediate storm or battle, but an image described with sounds that provide internal rhyme and slow the pace, delaying the inevitable: “In the field, just one small aspen/intertwines with pines/that align like soldiers.” We sit with the persona in the truck and “wait for the rain.”
In “Against the Current,” Martin-Bowen skillfully uses sound and imagery to create the rhythm of whitewater rafting. All our senses are engaged throughout the poem, again placing us with the speaker for a catharsis that we, at first, are not expecting. The poem’s first stanza puts us in the rat on that “crazy blue river” that is “so tough.”
    Wild as a woman caught in hot
    flashes, lapses of memory, it whips
    rapids into white caps, rages back
    and forth, and winds through canyons,
    switches back, cuts through an aspen grove
    interspersed with pines.

We are breathless by the second stanza and “grip till our knuckles/whiten” in the third. By then, we’ve recognized the metaphor , and, as in times of stress, we can identify with the persona as she says, “We push on,/yet regret entering/this insane race.” Like her other poems that present controlling metaphors, this one invites a second, third, and fourth reading to ponder the expansion of the images into a larger reality.
The repetition of this sort of intense imagery in subsequent sections interweaves the poems together, as does the recurrent mention of places. The sonnet, “Everyone Connects Kansas with Oz,” which ends the first section, presents snapshots of places like the Flint Hills, Cottonwood Falls, and St. Fidelis’s altar in the Cathedral of the Plains. We see more of Kansas in section two in “Floating through Coffeyville on Pontoon Boats: Flood Poem #3 (2007),” and in section three, “Cathedral of the Plains (St. Fidelis Church)” describes that notable cathedral visible from I-70 at Victoria, Kansas, the architecture of which seems out of place on the plains. Connecting in this section with poems set in England, this one shows “white marble” that “guards the sanctuary.” Discussing St. Fidelis, Martin-Bowen also divulges some autobiographical information that connects her with the saint—a German heritage and the study of law. But she says, “I come from German farmers in Mankato,/where the prairie roils from rust to green,/acres away from this Plains Cathedral” and makes the following confession: “burdened with uncertainties,/I wonder if I’m a tsunami or a soaring melody.” In the last section, “The Soul of Kansas Might be a Scream” is an unrhymed sonnet with sights and sounds that reveal the song of Kansas as both melody and tsunami scream. “You hear it late at night when the moon/becomes a sliver in someone’s dream” the poem begins, then lists several possibilities: “It might come from John Brown’s ghost/or the specter haunting the WPA castle” or be “wails from Bob Elliot, who died in a wreck/on the red trail winding down from the peak.” The sestet makes Kansas like the edge of the world: Perhaps it’s the lonely moan of a locomotive over plains where fires break through nights. Maybe it’s the shriek from the red-tailed hawk circling yuccas in the cemetery where the snow never stays, or from the western ridge where coyotes cry and geese wing through wide, blood-red skies.

Throughout the collection, not only do the lyric poems draw us to those different locations, but the persona poems present different views of life and reality. Whether it’s a landlady, a trucker’s wife, a Madonna statue, or a prostitute who started a fire in her brothel, the characterization is dramatic. A few of the poems that use Biblical characters as personas could give a distorted view of events and ideas to the reader who has not also read the Scriptural accounts. In the award-winning poem, “Peter’s Wife,” the wife, if taken seriously, mistakenly refers to conjugal love-making as sin. This, of course, does not detract from the literary merit of the poem but can confuse some readers. Details stray from the literal account or are presented out of sequence in “Mary Magdalene Rebukes Peter” and “Mary at the Wedding in Cana.” However, Martin-Bowen’s other poems with Biblical personas probe a fact often neglected—that the people who are mentioned in the Bible were real people, with human thoughts and emotions like ours. Other personas are perceptive and captivating because of the authenticity of their voices. In “The landlady says,” a non-cognizant landlady suggests a clever metaphor but is totally oblivious to the wisdom she has spoken, creating a humorous tone.
The book’s title poem appears last in the collection. At first, I wondered why; when finished, I knew. “Standing on the Edge of the World” is a powerful poem which combines Martin-Bowen’s use of rich imagery, musical repetition of sounds and words, and unique perceptions of a persona to place the reader where that persona is. The poem’s speaker is a woman who is “tired of working this town, sick of selling/my body to solders” who don’t even call her by the right name. She says, “Maude’s Pleasure Palace gave me no pleasure” and confesses to “dousing kerosene on/rafters, carpets, curtains, and sheets.” She knows of only one person who didn’t make it out, and that was one who was “dead already [ . . .] gone/before the first flame, before/I stepped into the lobby.” From here, the ambiguity spreads like kerosene upon a hard wood floor, as we realize the possibilities of the poem. Was the madam the dead one? Did the persona kill her? Or is the prostitute the dead one (by suicide), and the speaker her ghost?
Adding to the mystery is the mention in stanza one of an “overturned lamp/and a match,” which seems to set the incident in the nineteenth century. In the second stanza, we see a car idling and a mother shuffling her boy into it, which snaps us forward to the twentieth century. This bridging of time is mirrored by the poem’s images which echo earlier poems in a fresh way. Here the trees that line up are apple trees rather than aspen or pine, a detail that adds much to the poem. We stand with the persona, amidst “dead weeds,” aching “to ride morning’s wings through fields.” And then it hits us. The final two lines of the poem, of the book, carry the answer to the perpetual change of seasons, scenery, and settings. “When a door closes, they say, a window opens./I close my eyes and pray they’re right.” And this is where we leave that persona—woman or ghost: standing on the edge of the world. It’s where we all must come to sometime.
                    —Victoria Carroll

Victoria Carroll is the winner of the 2003 Word Journal Poetry Prize. Her poem, “Duende” appears in the Word Journal 2003, published under her married name. Her poetry has also appeared in the Connecticut Review, and reviews of poetry collections by Vivian Shipley, Denise Low, and Lois Marie Harrod have been published in the Midwest Quarterly and previous issues of Flint Hills Review. She teaches in the English department at the University of Kansas.