Reading this chapbook is like opening a collection of letters from a friend. (Full disclosure: The author is actually a friend of mine.) They are full of the kind of sharing I most look forward to: Here are my experiences and my subsequent insights; how about you?
In one poem we get memories of childhood, the sounds of skipping rope and rhyming chants summoning the flavor of those days. Then comes the twist of the adult looking back, which aligns with our own shift in perspective from nostalgia to knowledge.
We learn about the author’s assembled family: a combination of adopted and birth children, all beloved. Within this family, a braid of Filipino, African, and Caucasian ancestries, love reigns. More children, in their diversity, touch on the author’s life: climbing a tree, riding a bicycle in wide, persistent circles. Her poems find what they have in common.
She brings a listening ear and open heart to every encounter, such as the one where she is giving away condoms to a group to help stem the surge of AIDS and instead gives us their stories, their fears and illnesses.
Her fresh take on the father leaving for war in 1941, and the resulting loss of home and friends for the second-grader left behind, brings alive the sense of exile from your own life that so many children and adults felt during the COVID pandemic. Yet there’s humor too: She titles the poem “Even Napoleon had a place to go.”
In persona poems, Martin inhabits various young characters, effectively bringing their voices into print. And in some she captures their music, as in “Babydyke Rapper” which begins “Jeans halfway down my ass / T-shirt belly button short.”
This is a fun and heartfelt collection that will set you thinking and perhaps listening more carefully. That’s how it was for you? It was much the same for me.
Are you reading poetry these days? What are some poems that have touched you?