The Spoons in the Grass Are There to Dig a Moat

May 2, 2016
Martens centers her debut collection of quietly poignant prose poems on family, religion, and myth as she seeks a fragile safety in an uncertain, violent world. She grapples with atrocities through nebulous hints of strife and mayhem or with direct allusions to such events as the Boston Marathon bombing, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting. Flirting with political assertions, Martens references a "first world" where "the people eat endless appetizers and die from sadness," immigrants are exploited, and football fans tailgate as people starve in Africa. Several poems depict Jesus in a variety of wearying occupations such as fast food drive-through attendant, TSA agent, and factory foreman; these largely feel half-hearted and underwhelming. Martens's stripped-down language is her greatest asset, finding expression in "an ache shaped like a sunflower." Her relayed conversations with her daughters are charming and often profound: "She wants to take my heart out and sweep every room." In "Almost Biblical," the poet stirringly imagines her daughters as a pair of monkey pajamaâclad Pandoras opening a box to create the world. Martens's well-worn and occasionally overwrought politics may fall flat, but the personal touches soar, evidence of a solid poet finding her voice.

June 15, 2016

In this affecting volume of prose poems, a debut collection after a string of chapbooks, Martens moves from the beautiful, imperfect moments of domesticity ("And the apology I made for you came from a willow tree. From a lemon. From some mud I found in the living room") to issues of global urgency ("A man says a bomb doesn't have to be big;... an explosion of any size is enough"). Often, as she waxes intimately philosophical, Martens embraces both family and the political; in the lovely poem "Dear Brian Turner," to her daughter's comment that the soldier poet looks sad, she says, "I mentioned nothing about shrapnel, white space, or how it is to be inside yourself inside the dark." VERDICT An accomplished start-up from a poet to watch.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2016
In short bursts of prose poetry, Martens depicts a world on the verge. Whether she is proffering chilling indications of an apocalypse, agonizing over an earnest apology, or conjuring the latent melancholy of bedtime, she remains both playful and precise, at once whimsical and commanding. Through a series of pithy paragraphsthe majority of poems occupying no more than half the pageMartens fuses her daughter's declarative wonder ( Momma, my body is made of stars ) with the tribulations of Jesus working at a drive-thru ( By his first smoke break, even the hairnet hangs heavy ). She dismantles fairy tales ( Cinderella is a mound by the pumpkin patch ) and constructs cautionary parables ( This is where the frogs begin ). Repeated themes (three poems share the title In the First World, for example) are refreshingly interspersed with distinct shifts in rhythm, revisions of familiar phrasing ( heart-beaten, tonight is gut-shot ), and no shortage of startling imagery. Perhaps most remarkably, Martens' poetrypeppered with bones, blackbirds, cicadas, and soiloften carries the burden of a reality as tangible as it is surreal.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)