Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In her latest collection, Martin (Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life) contemplates the corporeal aspects of black identity, including scars from historical traumas and pain from fresher wounds. The former, which are largely related to slavery, forced labor, beatings, and lynchings, are "a story left in the dark body."A sinister "stranger" makes regular appearances, "ever-beckoning, black eyed and grinning"; he is both alluring and repellent. This contradiction is astutely delineated: "A thing you don't want can make you ravenous." Some of the poems are taken from a libretto performed at the Whitney Museum for the Yam Collective; these feature characters such as Nave, who is "haunted and empowered by connectedness to ancestors and traditions," and Perpetuus, a genderless being "untethered from the history of the body on Earth." The collection is not entirely grim. Existential insignificance is made palatable by imagining one is "God's little bird." Having done away with the stranger, the speaker is "a fish. Not pondering the hook." Martin experiments with form, toying with the page's negative space, and the inclusion of photographs makes the book a mixed-media experience. In this esoteric and ruminative work, God is shown to be present in the midst of a host of desires and griefs both great and small. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Library Journal Review
"Itch of layer, knot of/ hair-they call us Negro.// To stand broad-footed in sensation of being lit up." Thus opens this new collection from Martin, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award for her second collection, Discipline. Here, Martin uses a whiplash of short, punched-at-us phrases that offer a powerful sense of African American history and the struggle to define oneself for oneself, not as others would. History is a terrible burden ("What you drag:// your banjo, your braided/ neck-lace"), and its depredations lead to a desire for deeper connection: "Wanted the swell of black earth, a legacy, something larger than ourselves to hold us," says one poem. Another celebrates "my belly where Mother// left her good stock,.her matter that matters." Elsewhere, Martin challenges the notion of being put in boxes: "I am not a boy in anyone's body.// I am not a black in a black body./ I will not kowtow inside your opposites." The results are visceral, though the fractured phrasing occasionally leaves one struggling for sense. -VERDICT An important work for sophisticated readers. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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