Night of the Hawk: Poems

by Lauren Martin

Overview

When I have wandered long enough what am I still beholden to?

Ifá. Nature. Illness. Love. Loss. Misogyny. Aging. Africa. Our wounded planet. In this sweeping yet intensely personal collection, Lauren Martin tells the untold stories of the marginalized, the abused, the ill, the disabled—the different. Inspired by her life’s experiences, including the isolation she has suffered as a result both of living with chronic illness and having devoted herself to a religion outside the mainstream, these poems explore with raw vulnerability and unflinching honesty what it is to live apart—even as one yearns for connection.

But Night of the Hawk is no lament; it is powerful, reverential, sometimes humorous, often defiant—“Oh heat me and fill me / I rise above lines”—and full of wisdom. Visceral and stirring, the poems in this collection touch on vastly disparate subjects but are ultimately unified in a singular quest: to inspire those who read them toward kindness, compassion, and questioning.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781647426583
Publisher:	She Writes Press
Publication date:	05/14/2024
Pages:	88
Sales rank:	939,932
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Lauren Martin is a psychotherapist, poet, and devoted Ìyânífá. She studied poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. She spent years writing without submitting her work due to a long shamanic journey that led her to both Ifá and the writing of this collection of poems. Lauren lives in Oakland, California.

Editorial Reviews

A work of primordial feminine beauty, Night of the Hawk is a poetic pleasure. Reading this panoramic collection is like flying, circling the earth, and diving down often to examine a place, predicament, or feeling. . . . a balm to readers—the work of a gifted poet with an original voice.”—Foreword Reviews, 5/5 STARS

“Martin uses passionate, sometimes profane, language to speak out against misogyny and violence against women. Hers is a message of female empowerment and activism . . . Woven into a tapestry of emotional turmoil are poems celebrating friendship and inspiring hope, as Martin boldly declares, ‘And one day I will dance...That day is today.’”—US Review of Books

“Martin gives us a masterclass on what it means to convey thematic richness and emotional depth in contemporary poetry in Night of the Hawk, displaying the versatility of both form and function.”
—Readers Favorite

“The poems gathered here address themes of survival, chronic illness, shamanism, and feminism against the backdrop of daily life. . . . The diversity of experience examined makes for a collection that is both full and human. A whole life in one volume.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Lauren’s poems drop into your psyche and ripple outward, echoing in the moments of life. Their beauty haunts. She explores both all-too-human realities and spiritual aspirations. The Visible and Invisible reflecting one another. The surface and the depths. The sacred and the vile. In the interaction of the poles of these paradoxes, the mystical mind emerges and is drawn out in daily experience. Lauren is not afraid to ask the hard human questions of Spirit and not afraid to expect spiritual meaning of messy human encounters.”
—Sallie Ann Glassman, Head Manbo Asogwe, La Source Ancienne Ounfo

“Night of the Hawk is a luminous and numinous collection about women and men, about betrayal and forbearance, about endurance, death, and art, and, most essentially, about the search for a sacred path through life. There is so much love in these poems; the jeweled lines sparkle and sing off the page—sometimes playful, sometimes frightening in their honesty, but always tender in their forgiveness of human foibles. Ms. Martin’s voice is oracular, and her poems insist on their dignity and mystery even as they shoot on a zipline, fast and nimble, to your heart. She tells the truth, but as her forebear famously advised, she tells it slant. These are painful poems, but healing ones.
—Michael Laurence, award-winning playwright of Hamlet in Bed, Krapp39, and Cincinnatus

From the Publisher

2023-11-07
Martin offers a collection of intimate and political poems in a voice both contemplative and strong.

The poems gathered here address themes of survival, chronic illness, shamanism, and feminism against the backdrop of daily life. Many poems contain references to the Yoruba religion, and the text includes a glossary explaining the terms, although the spiritual element is usually implied rather than explicated. In “My Experience as a Postmenopausal Woman,” the speaker laments the way older women are disregarded both in terms of femininity and feminism: “One in which there is no respect for the / elder authority of the endocrine system / and years of misogyny with no / conversation. Where we screamed into / the Grand Canyon that blew dust back / into our faces on the hot wind.” “Spirochete” condemns the systemic rejection of people living with chronic illness, shedding light on an injustice that’s simultaneously social and spiritual: “Oh Lyme Disease / You bitch // This morning you / Split my lip / Why? / Because you could…” “The Waiting Tree” explores the contrast of familiarity and nature with the utter chaos and heartbreak of the Chibok schoolgirls’ mass kidnapping in 2014: “In Nigeria / Time is specific / Dawn is 6am / Dusk is 6pm…” Some poems are spirited and play with form and rhyme without compromising the strength of voice; “Chattanooga” opens with “(Who do you do / And how do you fais do-do) // I am a poet / A New Yorker / An Òrìsà person…” In a prose piece (“Untitled Tilda Swinton Poem”), the speaker encounters her punk rock hero accompanied by a young man in the streets of Manhattan: “My mind hidden behind a sopping wet t-shirt and 7 days worth of cayenne and lemons. They weren’t even dirty. They could have been floating on the Mediterranean Sea. And then, they did…” The diversity of experience examined in these poems makes for a collection that is both full and human.

A whole life in one volume.

Kirkus Reviews