Hold This

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From the first words in Hold This, Martin invites us into a universe of yearning and transformation, as the boy narrator shimmers into the body of a bird whose feet are ‘letters’ and whose wings allow him to ascend the mysterious reaches of a broad sky. Here, love and death contend within the confining frame of time. Mirrors may be both glass to reflect our questions, our desires, our fallibilities, and doors opening into a new vision of the world in which we are lucky enough to live. Full of feeling, but never sentimental, Martin beckons us to consider the deep questions even while lightening his lines with wordplay and humor (‘The gods can be so sloppy sometimes’). A master at both understatement and richly observed detail of the human and natural world, Martin invites us into ‘the smoky/back room of [the] heart’ where love may or may not meet its match, and where loss and death prompt existential questions couched in the most accessible of terms (‘He has the look of a man who’s trying to forget things before they happen’). ‘Hold this, ’ he says: and we are lucky to open this book, to feast on these poems, to allow them into our hands and hearts.

–Judith Montgomery, author of Passion, Red Jess and Pulse & Constellation