Instructions for the Lovers

Martin’s avant-garde fifth volume (after Good Stock, Strange Blood) employs a fragmented form that invites readers to explore epicurean—and sometimes hedonistic—complexity and vulnerability. With wide-open daring, these poems address the poet’s relationship with past lovers, including the self. In the title entry, the speaker declares they “used to fuck almost any body out of starvation hunger that splits the one into many and leaves you/ arching toward a stinky mattress on a floor. It could be. I could have been. Times when the world/ dissolved.” In “The Wild Weed,” the reader is invited to ponder the possibility of transcending boundaries for the joy of artistic discovery: “What savagery disrobes inside order? What street fight made fragile in a hot/ face glow parted so that, so that/ all liquid is in retrieval.” Other poems offer a raw depiction of academic culture. In the “Winter,” the speaker asserts: “At the university, we/ exhausted a brand/ of racism and wanted another/ wanted whatever was wound by invisible wire/ our eyes blotted by stones.” This charismatic collection explores the phenomenological complexities of human connection. (May)