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.