Description
Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. Lynn Martin's wild embodiments of landscape are here published posthumously. Like the scorpions and Appalachian mountains very much alive in these poems, Martin's work announces a new magical understanding of the spirits present in our daily environments through an unrelenting generosity towards the simple and "known unknowns" of the universe.
"SHIVER sings of a profound and precise recognition of dirt as prayer. Like a sped-up Niedecker, Martin s silence between threats is a lush, heartful yet spare open invitation to regard fish as seeds and cabins as husks for handmade dwelling. Her language plows through and strips debris littering the Blue Ridge Mountains of the everyday. And in this way, nature is truth as in how a one-room school house becomes its own entire universe almost like Whitman swollen with his multitudes. Martin's deep breath and echoing rhythms restore and return us to our earth-water-sky-filled selves and we are lucky. Get on board with this moaning, murmurous, hullabalooing wild poetry of place."—giovanni singleton
"Lynn Martin is a master builder, an apostle of the Appalachians, of mountain and hollow, of river and tree, of bird, bear, and deer. In her loved land she works and sees, praises and sings while building houses, chinking walls, and crafting these poems, classic in unaffected directness, exquisite in lithe elegance. At home or elsewhere, Lynn Martin is a poet of the vixen's start at the fox's bark, the sudden quake in solid ground, the involuntary shivers of an improvised life, shivers of delight and desire, of shocking beauty and descending dark."—Stephen Cushman
"Here is a monumental work. Lynn Martin speaks to us like a great oak on a mountainside, her poems like rustling leaves summoning us down an enchanted path through deep forests to our eternal selves. In an age when truth, nature, love, and the meaning of words have been all but forgotten, Lynn Martin reminds us of things we ceased to know we knew."—Stephen Said
Author Bio
Born in the Bronx in 1957, Lynn Martin hitchhiked around the country after leaving New York, traveled in Mexico, joined the Twin Oaks commune in Virginia, bartended in New Orleans, and worked in construction in Boston and D.C. before settling down in Nelson County, Virginia, where she lived for many years in a cabin in the mountains. While making a living as a carpenter, Martin earned a BA from Sweet Briar College, where she studied with Mary Oliver. She went on to earn an MEd from Lynchburg College and became a very creative, effective, and much loved special education teacher. She often performed her poetry with backup musicians (who were also her godsons). SHIVER (Tender Buttons Press, 2019) is Martin's second book. She died in 2016.
Author City: AMHERST, VA USA