Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life - by Dawn Lundy Martin (Paperback)

About the Book

A provocative new collection examining the power of language and race in contemporary culture by a leading American poet

Book Synopsis

Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life continues leading American poet Dawn Lundy 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 & queer in contemporary America.

Review Quotes

"Life in a box is a pretty life, arrangements and things... Almost everything we've ever desired is diminished when enclosed," writes Martin (Discipline) in the title poem of her third full-length collection. The "boxes" she explores are the various tools used to understand and communicate human experience, particularly language, recorded history, and identifying markers such as race and gender. "We are method. We are order. What would you do without us?" Martin demands in the voice of such boxes. Her poetry counters their rigid and totalizing nature through striking and original use of collage-like, disorienting prose, which does not always cohere around a central narrative or continuous "I" figure. As she ponders "How to inhabit the sensation of living," Martin foregrounds points of rift and friction--especially when speaking pointedly of and from a black, female, and queer experience--as a way to destabilize limiting narratives that often circumscribe these subjects. "What are the dimensions of the field? They've put me here in the tallest grasses and the strangest fruit and have demanded at gunpoint that I bend into it over and over." Martin speaks directly to such violent subjugation while pressing her language to a slippery, unruly, and vibrant place of resistance.--Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Dawn Lundy Martin was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for her first poetry collection, A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering. A founding member of the Black Took Collective, a group of experimental black poets, she is an associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.