Full Description
In Nighthawks, Lisa Martin traces a creaturely interconnectedness, traversing land, ecology, and other boundaries amid crises unfolding at a global scale. These poems parse aspects of human embodiment—emotion, relationship, mortality—and reflect on how to live through moments of intense personal and political upheaval. Long verses about the remnants of marriage and divorce, and a sonnet cycle about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, sit alongside lyrical explorations of midlife loneliness, mothering, and grief. Philosophical ruminations on form and language are also present, asking what good is a poem, a verse, in a world so full of things one might hold an aversion to? "What if I write a line, follow it in, what if / the line tears what I didn't mean to open?" Martin's experimental collection engages in exquisite emotional truth-telling, asking how we can hold and tend the world with more attunement and care.
Contents
Staying Power
I.
False Awakening
Frog Rain
Escape Room
Crashing the Floodgates
Tabula Rasa
Flotsam and Jetsam
The Thrill of the Find
Blood Concordance
Equinox in the Crystal Forest
A Portrait Made of Seaweed
I'm Not Being Hard on Myself, You're Being Hard on Yourself
Onism for Beginners
If You're Anything Like Me
At the Oracle of Delphi
Be Someone Who Would Have Been Burned at the Stake 500 Years Ago
Aesthetics
II.
Zagajewski
Three Years, Two Months and Twelve Days after My Father Dies Overseas
Mountain Concordance
Communique from the Fortunate Islands
University of Alberta Press
Epithalamion
Loss Isn't so Important
Moon Phasery
Ghazal with Malbec, No Cigarettes
The Pomegranate Year
Spring Poem Ending With a Line from Roo Borson
Ulcerative Colitis Remission Conditional
Winter Solstice
Unboxing Day
Self-Portrait as Demolished Supermarket
Hauntological
Artifact Inventory
Disassembly Line
III.
Whatever It Takes
The Fish Trees
Communique from Atlantis
Bloorcourt Elegy
Yes, And
Against "The Road Not Taken"
Modern Miracles
How the Moon Invents Memory
Cloud Concordance
Still, Life
Anabasis
If You Dwell on a Grave While out of Breath
Sea Grief
Marriage Tales
Minor Worries
Marvelosity
University of Alberta Press
New Year's Day Lament
Living Will
Between Falling to Earth and Floating In Space
Sublunary
Notes
Acknowledgments
