Publisher Description

African-American and a native of the South, poet Carl Martin's literal and figurative "Brit Vernacular" asks of its reader nothing less than a total ignorance of expectation. These poems, coming after a long silence - Martin's first book, the acclaimed "Go Your Stations, Girl," appeared in 1991, and his second, "Genii Over Salzburg," in 1998 - engage Romantic tropes such as Vision, Beauty, and the Self cheek-by-jowl with a Pop madness and a Modern despair, all in a high cadence that is winkingly isolate, stunningly productive.Martin's allusions and affinities are to and with Olympians of aesthetic conduct: Tolstoy, Maxfield Parrish, Jean Genet, Maeterlinck, Kate Moss, Peter Pan, the Green Man. "That's a sprinkle of rice in the air, a small fountain/ ingrained in the brain. Some glee in a philosophy/ of interference between world and self. Objects/ Flee, bolting and coursing in the wide green field." These lines are marbled through with the Real, and buffed by an apprehension so alert to Unreality as to be downright illuminating.

Author Biography

CARL MARTIN is a native of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he lives and writes today.

Review Quote

"Each of the poems in Carl R. Martin's Rogue Hemlocks is miraculous and leads to a broad spectrum of meaning and possibility...\R\R...For the most part, however, Martin's syntax and diction, his wacky music, his sense of history and pop-culture are idiosyncratic. Each of his poems is a singular disturbance in the matrix of contemporary poetry.\R\RIf there is any weakness in Martin's writing it is that this sense of wonder it invokes can be intimidating. The generousness and sublimity of the poems in Rogue Hemlocks may not be for everyone, but everyone should seek them out and be challenged by them."--Ben Mirov ,

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