Amelia Martens (Poetry) | Paducah, KY
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Negotiable |
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Anywhere |
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martensamelia
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http://ameliamartens.com/ |
gmail.comAmelia Martens is the author of The Spoons in the Grass are There To Dig a Moat, a book of prose poems, selected by Sarabande Books for the 2014 Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature (April 2016). She received both an MFA in Creative Writing and an MS in Literacy, Culture, and Language Education from Indiana University. She teaches part-time for West Kentucky Community & Technical College, where she is also the Associate Literary Editor for Exit 7: A Journal of Literature and Art. Her poetry chapbooks include: Purgatory (Black Lawrence Press, 2012), Clatter (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2013), and A Series of Faults (Finishing Line Press, 2014).
Books
Chapbooks
Press & Reviews
“This is a powerful and original collection of prose poems. Each poem is its own non-linear, semi-surreal expression, but it dawns on the reader, with a sobering chill, that these poems refer to our actual world and our present time. Not surprisingly, this book involves a slow-motion nightmare, one we would turn away from if we had an alternative. But we don’t—and that may be the hardest truth this book discovers by never directly landing on it. Love alone provides a light, and there isn’t an alternative to that, thank goodness.”
—Maurice Manning
“Amelia Martens is one of a kind, a true original, a rare star. She speaks of the everyday and the metaphysical in the same breath, composing poems with dark wit that witness the bizarre in the ordinary, fiction in fact, and vice versa. I find myself reading her poems over again over, pondering her peculiar and powerful magic.”
—Nin Andrews
“Whether she is proffering chilling indications of an apocalypse, agonizing over an earnest apology, or conjuring the latent melancholy of bedtime, [Martens] remains both playful and precise, at once whimsical and commanding…. As tangible as it is surreal.”
—Booklist
“Wise, joyous, keen, tender… She shows us the divine in the most unexpected places.”
—Catherine Bowman
“Heartbreaking and hilarious…Martens is a magician and her magic is potent.”
—Richard Cecil
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