Between voting on submissions, confirming edits, and planning our summer's launch, I wanted to dig into some current poetry that's being published this summer. I knew that I wanted to read works from poets that are also scholars and activists, so when I saw that there was a recent poetry collection published that focuses on embodiment, queer relationships, and systemic racism written by a Black and queer author, I immediately went to buy it. I'll be honest; I didn't know who Dawn Lundy Martin was prior to picking up this book, but after reading it I've been scouring the internet to find out more about her. Martin is an essayist, poet, conceptual-video artist, and activist against misogyny, racism, and queerphobia. Born in 1968, Martin has influenced many with her works: Good Stock, Strange Blood (2017), Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (2015), Discipline (2011), and A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering (2007), to name a few. She has received a number of awards for her work and has taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Bard College, and The New School. Needless to say, she has done much for the queer, Black community.
Her latest work, published this June by Nightboat Books, is called Instructions for The Lovers. It's a beautiful, philosophical love letter to humanity, broken up into four main parts but interspersed with larger pieces that tie things together. There's a prelude at the start of it, [After wind was water], that introduces what the collection will continue to prod and question at: language's stability. Throughout the book, Martin scrutinizes the capacity language has to truly contain the multitudes of a body and human soul, and her first piece kicks this off by exploring simplicity, space, and distance. As a poet myself, in addition to being an editor, I was fascinated by Martin's artistic choices and their effects on myself as a reader. Language, or more specifically its fringes, has been an interest of mine for quite some time: I often find myself thinking that we ask ourselves to do an impossible task every day. Explain what happened. Describe how you feel. How could I possibly do that correctly when we ourselves made up the rules for expression? Words exit our bodies, and the more we produce, the further we stand apart from our own beings.
Nevertheless, Martin's poems find a way to use language, a forever flawed medium, to express a multiplicity of meaning while, at the same time, describing unique experiences. She manages to blend the universal with the intimate, telling a story so personal that it resonates with everyone. And while doing so, she doesn't shy away from the grotesquely mundane. The first two lines of "Perspective is supposed to yield clarity" depicts this nicely: "To waste years half alive, grumbled up in one's lazy / wallowing, is how the tonic lay across me like a monster / blanket. I watched a lot of porn. I drank a lot of whiskey." Martin captures the misery, the dread of time passing and a lack of purpose. She shows anxiety in futility, like in "No language suffices the lover," where she notes our antics: "Pretend we exist. / Try language, try excessive sweetness. / No name for things. / No names for phenomena. / Wound gathers around borders. / How long can we live without a body?" (lines 8-13). And what a question that is! How viable is it to flee from the body? And why do we do it? There are many reasons: often times it is to escape from pain, which courses through this entire collection.
Martin embodies the pain of owning female anatomy, of being Black in a colonized, Western world, and of loving the wrong people in a hetero-normative society. She flays out the desire, nihilism, and hedonism that festers from a lack of body, as seen in her titular piece, "Instructions for the lovers"----"I create you in the / image of my desire. Which makes you nothing" (lines 19-20). But even so, she brings hope. Her conversational pieces, like "About art, D+D" and "D+S on lovers," bring in the beauty of a lover, the joys of conversation and another voice in the void space which is human existence. Martin ends by suggesting that a lover is not a savior, but a collaborator in this dark abyss; the holes and nothingness aren't closed doors, but openings for life, for richness. In the end, she asks, "If you / were the most ideal / lover to yourself, what / would you help / yourself open in and / for yourself?" ("D+S on lovers" lines 103-108). Out of all the darkness she depicts, Martin shows readers a light. Her poetry compliments and spurs on the activism she partakes in to change society into something more equitable for all people. She champions loving one's self, despite the pain and, at times, despite reason. This is just one of the reasons I fell in love with this collection. I can't quite capture my excitement and inspiration with words (go figure), but I know what I feel in my body when I read these poems, and I look forward to collecting her previous work to catch up on her greatness.
Truly, what an amazing find! If you're also a poetry nerd like me who's a fan of the feminist and philosophical, I highly recommend checking Martin's works out. Down below I've linked some information and interviews with Martin, so be sure to give them a listen. In the meantime, Penumbra will be preparing for our summer launch, which should take place in a couple weeks. Look forward to seeing more beautiful pieces in our latest edition in the very near future!
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To learn more about Martin from the Poetry Foundation, click here.
To purchase "Instructions for The Lovers," click here.
Learn more about Martin on her website by clicking here.
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