* Sonnets and Looms are available from the following vendors: Small Press Distribution Cheers!
A deserted city. We’ll have to imagine
it’s in a movie. Beneath a listless dome, walls
crumble into backlit dust. Flames on a hillside swarm,
tattered auburn fishes in the autumn wind. Glints of dying
light fall on unmoored mountains whose thoughts of home
come to nothing. Everywhere, flocks of matter dip pale snouts
into inky ponds. We’ll have to imagine someone watching
that movie. No one left to forget irrelevant seeds. Some left off
praying to the mother of a tarnished idol presiding over a flock
of angels, breath attended by golden lice. Others
paused long enough to view dusk’s leisurely descent
over the white noise of crashing surf. All found something
to swear by before it was too late. Photogenic dullards jazzed
in the waning light. A ship’s captain jingled his coins
before staving in the ship. Embers in a hearth
illuminated fish bones on plates.
Book City in Toronto
Apollinaire’s Bookshoppe
Amazon.ca
Shearsman Books.
Camille Martin
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Blog: Rogue Embryo Topics:Collage, Photography, Poetry Camille Martin’s Author Page
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Praise for Looms
In tightly woven tapestry, Martin's 'backstreet songs' re-invent a music of knowledge that navigates the hucksterism and catastrophe threatening our planet. The movement of her threads is fugue-like, punctuated by oboes and clarinets, mockingbirds and cicadas. Here, in the dream-space of time-lapse film, forms of life and ideas collide and morph, rippling through centuries of human consciousness to unravel as quickly as they ravel. Here, above all, Martin makes it possible to dance among our 'origins in snake oil,' our 'crusades to mirages' and our 'accidental fictions'.
—Meredith QuartermainA dreamscape on the outskirts of town, 'in the badlands of the vernacular,' these hopeful, haunted poems populated by children and prisoners 'hover between' realms domestic and exterior, real and imagined. Like candles described herein, this book gives off a melting, tactile glow.
—Arielle GreenbergThere is such an expansiveness to Martin’s Looms. The poems exist in that magical place where words, images and ideas collide, creating connections that previously had never been.
—rob mclennan[Looms] has a very painterly, noir feel, alienated and penumbral, taut yet expansive. Impressive and addictive.
—Steve Spence for Stride MagazineLooms is a wonderful continuation of Martin's previous collection, Sonnets, in which she explored similar themes as well as playing with the sonnet form. Martin has proven herself to be a solid poet with an ear for language and an inquisitive mind, delving into the big questions we all face. In this collection, Martin has woven a rich tapestry of poems that are well worth perusing.
—Cort Bledsoe for BookslutCamille Martin's Looms, like Penelope's famous twenty-year woven prevarication while Odysseus is out and about, begins each day anew with each poem, each poem begun without fanfare and needing none. . . . I got with the agenda, gloriously so - allowed myself to float, to be shuttled (but not shuttlecocked) from perspective to image and on, each [poem] a frame and yet an embrace, a scene and invitation. I recommend you get hold of Looms.
—Sarah SaraiPraise for Sonnets
In these taut, fast-paced, self-aware poems, the lyric meets 21st century paranoia and sparks fly.
—Rae ArmantroutThere is magnificence in these poems, a poetic magnetic, propelling you to turn the page.
—Jordan Scott”Intellectually fearsome and restlessly exploratory . . . rigorous and uncompromising . . . torqued high."
—Marianne Villanueva for Galatea ResurrectsThere’s none of the lyrical self-absorption one finds in too many collections. . . Martin has a very good ear, as in a fun, almost Hopkinsesque piece that flirts with nonsense, but stays syntactically coherent.
—Quill and QuireThere are so few who seem to know how to bring something new to an often-used form that when it happens, it’s worth noting, and such is the case with Camille Martin in Sonnets. Martin writes with the most wonderful sense of clarity, thought and play in these poems.
—rob mclennanSonnets is a delightful body of work. Even though we wander into the oblique there is never alienation. Incredible poetic craft.
—James Mc Laughlin, Stride MagazineCamille Martin’s poems shimmer with repetition deft as sweetest breath mid-spring.
—Sheila E. MurphyCan you pour new wine into old bottles? Well, if you are Camille Martin and the bottles are sonnets, the answer is an emphatic, "Yes."
—Carol Dorf, New Pages Book ReviewsPraise for Codes of Public Sleep
Codes of Public Sleep breaks open the code of private thought to modes of knowing catastrophe that defy insufficient isolating sagas. Camille Martin's poetry is the shattering signal from a laudably wild tongue that will not keep still for our death-drive culture. This is a remarkable collection.
—Carla Harryman
Rogue Embryo- “At first I was adrift . . .”: Camille Martin’s LOOMS
- Minimalist poems in the new Otoliths
- Photos: Adam Seelig, Jim Johnstone, and Camille Martin at the Art Bar (host: Josh Smith)
- Jim Johnstone | Adam Seelig | Camille Martin at the Art Bar (Toronto), Tuesday, April 9
- Photos: Oana Avasilichioaei and Camille Martin at Argo Bookshop, Montreal (Bonus: Zen Snowcat)
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Golden lice! What an image for the apocalypse!