Who Else in the Dark Headed There - by Garth Martens (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In his first collection since the GG-nominated Prologue for the Age of Consequence, Martens adds an autobiographical lens to his concerns about class and labour, sharpening the landscape of 80s and 90s northern Alberta with a controlled, imagist eye.

In Who Else in the Dark Headed There, we meet someone right up against the loss of his mother in a place where the feeling of the darkheaded there and the person who is moving toward it, or who is in it, can be set. As in a scene in a play. As in a dream. There is, from the difficulty of childhood, which can't be changed, an understanding that time is not fixed and that distance is fluctuating. Here, in many registers, the language of memory is disturbed, syntax and point of view are disturbed. It is a self looking back at an earlier self as if it is possible to be objective, when we know it's not possible, and therein is the grief and the searching and the resonance of the machinery of time.

Grappling with familial inheritances, and charged with undercurrents of violence, alcoholism, and isolation, Garth Martens writes with a language that is both clear-cut and surreal, evoking a rural, unstable portrait of childhood.

Review Quotes

Praise for Garth Martens

"The curtain is raised on blue-collar work. Here's 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 Writers

"Densely percussive, displaying a range of registers and a fiction-writer's penchant for voice character and intent . . . we have a lot to look forward to from Garth Martens."
--ARC Magazine

About the Author

Garth Martens is the author of Prologue for the Age of Consequence (House of Anansi) and the chapbook Remediation (JackPine Press). For his first book, he was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award in Poetry, and for a selection of poems from that manuscript, he won the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. In 2017, he co-founded Palabra Flamenco, a literary flamenco ensemble, as its producer and principal poet. He also produces Dark Sounds, a flamenco series on death, grief, and the climate crisis, featuring poet Jan Zwicky, dancer Denise Yeo, and guitarist Gareth Owen. For Alma de España Flamenco Dance Company, he performed his poetry in Pasajes, an international production. His work appears in Dark Mountain Project, Poetry Ireland, Hazlitt, This Magazine, Vallum, Fiddlehead, Grain, PRISM, Geist, Best Canadian Poetry, and 29 Mennonite Poets. He's a contributing editor for Arc Poetry Magazine and a former member of The Malahat Review's editorial board. He lives in Victoria, BC.