Theater of No Mistakes
Winner of the 2021 Rick Campbell Chapbook Award. Poet Alberto Ríos said of the collection: "There is in painting a Southwestern surrealism, and these poems often speak with the gifts those artworks in their figurations and colorings have offered. The lines in these poems often feel like masterly brushstrokes—of surprise, of unnerving juxtaposition, of possibility. 'Let the big / hand answer to the hours. Let the small hand answer / to us. You alone are what keeps you awake at night.' Rather than being bogged down in any tradition, however, or following anybody’s rules, these poems take sure flight and find a sky of their own."
Bio
M.L. Martin is an alum of the ASU creative writing program, having earned a Master of Fine Arts in 2009.
Praise for this book
"In M.L. Martin’s surrealist series, the desert is stage, actor, scene, and symbol. Musical syntax delight and beckon, syncopating with the undulating heat waves from distant mirages. The prose poems speak to the haunted life among the ocotillo and the palo verde with images depicting the sharp horizon, populating the empty spaces of the Sonoran Desert with strange finery. Martin’s ekphrastic meditations are equal parts sublime and sonorous.
Oliver de la Paz
