Good Stock Strange Blood

In her latest collection, Martin (Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life) contemplates the corporeal aspects of black identity, including scars from historical traumas and pain from fresher wounds. The former, which are largely related to slavery, forced labor, beatings, and lynchings, are “a story left in the dark body.”A sinister “stranger” makes regular appearances, “ever-beckoning, black eyed and grinning”; he is both alluring and repellent. This contradiction is astutely delineated: “A thing you don’t want can make you ravenous.” Some of the poems are taken from a libretto performed at the Whitney Museum for the Yam Collective; these feature characters such as Nave, who is “haunted and empowered by connectedness to ancestors and traditions,” and Perpetuus, a genderless being “untethered from the history of the body on Earth.” The collection is not entirely grim. Existential insignificance is made palatable by imagining one is “God’s little bird.” Having done away with the stranger, the speaker is “a fish. Not pondering the hook.” Martin experiments with form, toying with the page’s negative space, and the inclusion of photographs makes the book a mixed-media experience. In this esoteric and ruminative work, God is shown to be present in the midst of a host of desires and griefs both great and small. (Aug.)