Dawn Lundy Martin – författare

Dawn Lundy Martin’s work is neither language poetry, which rejects the speaking subject, nor strictly lyric, which embraces the speaking “I.” It might best be described as poetry where, in the words of Juliana Spahr, “the lyric meets language”—both an investigation into the opacity of language and the expression of a passionate speaker who struggles to speak meaningfully.Martin’s poems bend the form into something new, seeking a way to approach the horrific and its effect on the psyche more fully than might be possible in the worn groove of the traditional lyric. Her formal inventiveness is balanced by a firm grounding in bodily experience and in the amazing capacity of language to expand itself in Martin’s hands. She explodes any pretense at a world where words mean exactly what we want them to mean and never more nor less.The poems are neither gentle nor easy, but they make a powerful case that neither gentleness nor easiness is appropriate in the attempt to contend with the trauma and violence that are an inescapable part of human history and human experience. Martin’s book acknowledges the difficulty but not the impossibility of utterance in trauma’s wake, and it ventures into the unimaginable at many levels, from the personal to the cultural.

This stunning second collection engages the "disciplines" associated with regimes of powers and sadomasochism. The work interrogates the social and linguistic space between regimes of power enacted on the body, and thereby the soul.

How is the pre-Stonewall generation aging? What can the Stonewall generation expect?Combining personal experience and original research, this fascinating collection explores the practical and psychological issues of aging for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals. Midlife and Aging in Gay America provides highlights from the SAGE 2000 National Conference on the personal, psychological, and economic issues related to growing older as a member of a sexual minority. Midlife and Aging in Gay America delivers reports from a national conference on urgent issues, including:health care concerns retirement plans intergenerational romances lifestyle issues caregiving grief and loss

How is the pre-Stonewall generation aging? What can the Stonewall generation expect?Combining personal experience and original research, this fascinating collection explores the practical and psychological issues of aging for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals. Midlife and Aging in Gay America provides highlights from the SAGE 2000 National Conference on the personal, psychological, and economic issues related to growing older as a member of a sexual minority. Midlife and Aging in Gay America delivers reports from a national conference on urgent issues, including:health care concerns retirement plans intergenerational romances lifestyle issues caregiving grief and loss

From Good Stock Strange Blood:And, yet, each morning a fireheart grief in the body coming out of sleep. The listening to the smoke as if fills and weeps inside the chest, choking strength out hands weighted, dangling. We wonder where else it lives before it fills the body up. We assume it comes inside through the hole that promises invasion.Lundy Martin is author of A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering and DISCIPLINE, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award.

Longlisted for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award in PoetryA taut, tender collection of poems woven with sadness and loss dealing with aging, attachments, and the precarity of life.“Dawn Lundy Martin’s poems read like a real-time excavation of what poetry can and can’t do," writes Maggie Nelson. In Instructions for The Lovers, her most stripped down, direct work to date, Martin creates a poetic field dense with thought, image, and sound as she reflects on her relationship with her mother, experiences of queer polyamory, lesbian sex, and the racist conditions within the dying American university system. With rigorously embodied vulnerability and virtuosity, Martin constructs moments of pleasure, humor, and sexiness woven with grief—a tender body to live in.

Dawn Lundy Martin's Life in a Box is a Pretty Life investigates the ways in which language claims absolute knowledge and draws a box around lived experience. Martin writes poems that seek out moments when the box buckles, or breaks, poems that suggest there is more. Life in a Box is a Pretty Life continues Martin's investigation into what is produced in the interstices between the body, experience, and language, and how alternative narratives can yield some other knowledge about what it means to be black (or female, or queer) in contemporary America.