Who Else in the Dark Headed There

Description

In his first collection since the Governor GeneralsnominatedPrologue for the Age of Consequence, Martens adds an autobiographical lens to his concerns about class and labour.A mother disappears. A son struggles to make sense of the life she left behind. Set against the stark northern Alberta of the 1980s and 90s,Who Else in the Dark Headed Therefollows a man reaching through time to find the child he was and the father he is becoming.Beneath this waking world is another world, of the overheard, of the unsaid. To enter is to find a lyricism finely wrought and hallucinatory, a depth of feeling and fidelity to metaphor in all its guisesbut most of all an urgent relationship with language. Here, in a reconstruction of childhoods rooms, Garth Martens approaches the past not as a record but as a pressure, a muscled concentration that reorders, resuscitates, and redoubts.Praise forWho Else in the Dark Headed ThereThe language is sensory, emotive, and inexplicably captivating. Arresting fragments emerge from a relentless invocation of half scenes, stitched together with the singular logic of poetic memory (which is to say, with mystery.)Literary Review of CanadaPoems of intense emotion, the torque on the language extremeas it must be, reaching this far into the dark, this honestly.Jan ZwickyThe fragmented poems showcase an urgent relationship with language that is sensory, emotive and captivating.CBC BooksThis is hard stuff, looked at with a cold eye. Its beautiful, fierce, profoundly defensive, smart as heck, and intrusive.Harold Rhenisch,The BC ReviewPraise for Garth MartensThe curtain is raised on blue-collar work. Heres a poet of sweat and ambition and all the sensory detail and wild character that builds a world. Heroic, this writer is smoother than concrete.Jury citation, RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging WritersDensely percussive, displaying a range of registers and a fiction-writers penchant for voice, character, and incident . . . we have a lot to look forward to from Garth Martens.ARC Poetry Magazine