Climbing Back - Hardcover

Dionisio Martinez is the author of Bad Alchemy and recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. He lives in Tampa, Florida.

With a cast that includes the likes of Hendrix, Garbo, Monet, the Elephant Man, JFK, Warhol, John Lennon and, repeatedly, a contemporary Prodigal Son, Martinez's fourth collection reads less like the Bible and more like a millennial spread in Vanity Fair. Selected by the biblically preoccupied Jorie Graham (viz. this year's Swarm) for the National Poetry Series, these prose poems document a tired collision of high and low culture, drawing on Miles Davis, for example, to inform us that an artist "learning to scat is not unlike a fire learning to burn." Poem after poem piles up people and images, "a wealth of possibilities on the cutting room floorAbuildings to be demolished, voices to obstruct, faces to rearrange in a crowd, faces to pull out of a crowd, fields to be filled with faces, faces to fill with bewilderment," here with a nod to Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro." The short titles in the third section (i.e. "Credo," "Fate," Faith") come as a relief after the incessant anaphora used in the rest of the book's 50-odd titles which, though individually playful, collectively flatten: "The Prodigal Son envisions nothing," "The Prodigal Son succumbs to secular miracles," "The Prodigal Son investigates the Hemmingway suicides," etc. (Resemblances to Marvin Bell's "Dead Man" may be purely coincidental.) While the combination of vernacular culture and spiritual searching will appeal to some readers, the message borne by this Son isn't quite up to its precedent. (Nov.)
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