Overview

OF WATER NEVER CEASING is a poetry collection written from within the lived realities of chronic illness, treatment, and survival. Across these poems, Kristin Entler traces how the body becomes a site of ongoing care, interruption, and endurance, and how daily life reshapes itself around medical systems, fatigue, and uncertainty. Structured as a sustained sequence rather than a single arc, the collection moves through hospitals, exam rooms, homes, and moments of waiting. Entler writes with precision about diagnosis and treatment, but also about what happens outside the clinical frame: friendships strained by unpredictability, intimacy altered by pain, and the quiet labor of staying oriented to the present. The poems attend to bodily processes with clarity and restraint, resisting metaphor where it would soften the facts. Throughout the book, water functions as both presence and necessity. Hydration, infusion, flooding, and depletion recur not as symbols of cleansing or rebirth, but as markers of survival. The title reflects the book's insistence on continuation rather than cure. This is not a narrative of recovery, but of persistence within conditions that do not resolve. OF WATER NEVER CEASING also interrogates the language surrounding illness. Medical terminology, spiritual shorthand, and well-meaning consolation are tested against lived experience. Entler writes from within these systems while refusing their simplifications, insisting on accuracy, attention, and dignity. The final poems remain grounded in the ongoing nature of care. There is no closing gesture toward restoration. Instead, the collection affirms the daily work of living inside a body that demands vigilance and adaptation, and the quiet resilience required to keep showing up. In this remarkable debut, Kristin Entler offers a clear-eyed, unsentimental account of illness as a way of life, and of care as something practiced, imperfectly and continually, over time.

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Reviews

""Of Water Never Ceasing by Kristin Entler is a lyrical, unflinching debut that explores survival, chronic illness, and the fierce beauty of being alive."" -Kelly Riedesel, author of Proud Roads ""In Of Water Never Ceasing, the body becomes a meeting ground for carrion and sweetgum, antibiotics and insulin. I loved this."" -Garrett Ashley, author of Habitats and A Field Guide to North American Trees ""Of Water Never Ceasing is a luminous meditation on chronic illness and life's unavoidable bounty. In a moment when our country feels increasingly starved of empathy, these poems invite us into a deeper listening to both the natural world and to each other."" -Candice M. Kelsey, author of Another Place Altogether ""Pearls & nurses. Phlegm & honey. A body leaning in the doorway of mythos. Like a southern accent that lingers, Entler's words are subtle in their staying power."" -Brody Parrish Craig, author of The Patient is an Unreliable Historian ""Kristin Entler's Of Water Never Ceasing is a testament not only to disabled survival, but disabled futurity. This collection is an absolute force of a debut, and Entler is a stunning, necessary new voice for Southern and Disabled poetry."" -Raye Hendrix, What Good is Heaven ""Entler vividly renders the natural beauty of Alabama with the experience of being fiercely alive in a chronically ill body. These are poems of endurance and urgency."" -Ansel Elkins, author of Blue Yodel ""Entler takes us to 'the pause between breaths' with this stunning debut."" -Rachel Mennies, The Naomi Letters

Author Information

Kristin Entler is a writer and educator from Alabama, currently living in Western North Carolina. They hold an MFA in poetry from the University of Arkansas and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Their work can be found in The Bitter Southerner, Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, Porter House Review, BOOTH, and elsewhere. Entler can be found online @findmycure.

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