Martin, Dawn Lundy: Good Stock Strange Blood

Coffee House Press, 2017 These are poems about wounds at every stage: the breaking open, the scabbing over, the scar. A menacing stranger (“ever-beckoning, black eyed and grinning”) surfaces throughout the book, haunting and seducing the speaker, stitching together the book’s wide range of forms. Invested in multiple mediums, the poet also includes photographs and excerpts of a libretto (performed at the Whitney Museum for the Yam Collective). These words whip like a live wire. ––Gabrielle Bates * * * "No Humans Involved" When I was a girl of 9 or 10anyone could have meany way they wantedbecause speechclosed a blacknessin my throatso cavernous and loudthe blackness,a smoke so thickdon’t even think aboutthe procession on the bodyall their maws loaded up.