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
I.
Synaesthetic
Two
Take Down
Ars Poetica
Poem at the Closing of a Door
Mid Life
The News
If You Really Aren't A Racist, Take This Online Test
Elegy
Typology
II.
The Point
Para-texts
The Opening
Questions of Being
Post-partum
Left Breast with Lymph
Feminist Philosophy
The first meaning of 'accident' is anything that happens
Accommodation
Advanced Ethics for the Ex-Communicated
Anti-Anxiety (a Homeopathic)
III.
Beaverhill Lake
Notes on Arrivals and Departures
Bare posts, barbed wire
Field Guide to the Birds of Alberta
Why the question matters
Assertions of Likeness
Objects of the Marriage
A Song, or Call
Love
Verge
Nighthawks
Acknowledgements
