The Falling Down Dance
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Martin's lines are a brief as breath, and cloister us at home, in winter, where the tiny everyday ministrations of love and parenthood are magnified and abundant with meaning.
I wanted to tell you something
About the shipwreck
Of fatherhood, of motherhood, the coarse
Sugar leaving us
Shook. Soft wreck of the baby
Greeting each kiss
With an open
And drooling mouth, reflex
We don't understand
Heart-blip stuck
Tipping my finger
On the keys, speeding
Memory of yesterday out
The window I'm
Pushing barely open
Chris Martin is the author of American Music (Copper Canyon, 2007) and Becoming Weather (Coffee House Press, 2011).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this spare, poignant collection, Martin (Becoming Weather) invites readers into the microcosm of new fatherhood against a wintry backdrop that produces isolation and intimacy in turn. Right away he establishes a push and pull between lyrical and ordinary language: "our unreadiness took root/ and budded true/ joy," he writes, "I mean/ we had a baby. We named him after/ a lawyer." In this way Martin encourages his readers to see parenthood in all its contradictions; the beautiful addition and the nexus of complication. Martin cleverly spins these complications into fresh expressions, as when he hears "Atticus/ rip open/ morning's door/ with his wail" before wondering, "So a baby's/ a boombox, right?" He also tenderly explores the changes in a romantic partnership when a third party is suddenly introduced: "In the other room you're/ drinking milk, you're giving milk, my/ two yous." Moments of beauty like this emerge starkly amid the clutter and commerce of daily life and the winter's stillness and monochromatic palette. From radiance to sheer panic from "sudden dad stoned on bare/ life" to "the grounding where/ I fear not life and love/ the living" these poems celebrate the domestic, still somewhat of a novelty coming from a male poet, and articulate the wild range of emotion a new parent experiences.