About this item
Highlights
- Splitting Open the World, borrows its title from Muriel Rukeyser's question, What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
- Author(s): Carolyn Martin
- 96 Pages
- Poetry, Subjects & Themes
Description
About the Book
Exploration of a world split open in poems about family and friends, about life as an English teacher and Roman Catholic nun, and about the inspiration lurking in the everyday.
Book Synopsis
Splitting Open the World, borrows its title from Muriel Rukeyser's question, What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open. Recognizing that in this wobbly universe, truths strain, turn, twist/to revise themselves, Martin explores a world split open in poems about family and friends, about life as an English teacher and Roman Catholic nun, and about the inspiration lurking in the everyday. -----------"Part memoir, part elegy, Splitting Open the World is another rich and welcome collection by a stellar poet."
-Andrea Hollander, author of And Now, Nowhere But Here
"Everyone who enters these pages will delight in these poems and become better people in the process."
--Colette Tennant, Ph.D., author of Sweet Gothic
"Carolyn Martin's Splitting Open the World is a bonfire of illuminated reckoning, reconciliation, and redemption. As this buoyant speaker transmutes the agonies of witness to the grace of wisdom, the reader is also transformed."
--Sage Cohen, author of Writing the Life Poetic
Review Quotes
In the epigraph to Carolyn Martin's Splitting Open the World, Muriel Rukeyser asks, "What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open." In this spectacular collection, Martin admits that "in this wobbly universe, truths strain, turn, twist to revise themselves" as she wrangles with the truths about her relationship with her mother, her various loves, and her careers as a nun, teacher, and business woman.
She demonstrates her deep empathy for all lives around her--from her six-year-old Ethiopian neighbor to a homeless woman on a highway ramp to a tiger at the San Diego Safari Park. In one stunning image after another, she flings her generosity wide to include all life on earth affected by climate change where "Every living thing is scrambling to memorize seasons that won't stand still." Everyone who enters these pages will delight in these poems and become better people in the process.
-Colette Tennant, Ph.D., author of Sweet Gothic
How do we become who we are? In order to find out, Carolyn Martin interrogates her past ("the girl / who can't keep words in her mouth") and follows its path to her present. Along the way, she uncovers truths, never turning away from her own flaws. At the center of her investigation is her long-lived mother, who "mapped / her way around constraint, found its edge, and flew." Part memoir, part elegy, Splitting Open the World is another rich and welcome collection by a stellar poet.
-Andrea Hollander, author of And Now, Nowhere But Here
"Poetry is just the evidence of life," said Leonard Cohen. "If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash." Carolyn Martin's Splitting Open the World is a bonfire of illuminated reckoning, reconciliation, and redemption. As this buoyant speaker transmutes the agonies of witness to the grace of wisdom, the reader is also transformed. We are "Free to stand / outside [ourselves] and revel in ecstasy" with her as loss, grief, and shame are eclipsed by wonder and possibility. This collection splits open our world, then makes it whole again in a feast of astonishment.
--Sage Cohen, author of Writing the Life Poetic