The Wire Fence Holding Back the World

Winner of the 2016 Turtle Island Quarterly Editor’s Choice Chapbook Award.According to Jared Smith, These tightly coiled lyric poems are born of the earth, and of the interface between observation, intellect, faith, and logic. They are of childhood and old age, of butterflies and songbirds and turtles, and of the mountains and grasses…all those things that are ignited and illumined by the sun. But this is not a gentle sun. It is a sun made jagged and sharp, that shatters against darkness. It turns the leaves of summer into dust and it drags life down into the darkness that shrouds it. Yet as Martin’s vision shows, even in carrion there is life and light coming forth from that darkness that thrives on it. And even as the last light drops from our fingers, that light is a seed that peers over the horizon for all that will follow. This is a profound book of hope and belief in those things that are bigger than we know of.