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

Book Synopsis

In his first collection since the Governor General's-nominated Prologue 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 There follows 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 guises--but most of all an urgent relationship with language. Here, in a reconstruction of childhood's rooms, Garth Martens approaches the past not as a record but as a pressure, a "muscled concentration" that reorders, resuscitates, and redoubts.

Review Quotes

Praise for Who Else in the Dark Headed There

"The 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 Canada

"This is hard stuff, looked at with a cold eye. It's beautiful, fierce, profoundly defensive, smart as heck, and intrusive."
--Harold Rhenisch, The BC Review

"The fragmented poems showcase an urgent relationship with language that is sensory, emotive and captivating."
--CBC Books

"Poems of intense emotion, the torque on the language extreme--as it must be, reaching this far into the dark, this honestly."
--Jan Zwicky

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 incident . . . 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 and Who Else in the Dark Headed There. For his first book, he was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry. He is also a past winner of the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. His poetry appears in Dark Mountain Project, Poetry Ireland, Hazlitt, This Magazine, Vallum, Fiddlehead, and Best Canadian Poetry. He is also a member of Palabra Flamenco, a literary flamenco ensemble that joins traditional flamenco dance and music with poetry and oral storytelling. He lives in Victoria, BC.