I was repeatedly drawn to the fractures in my life—the gaps between childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, and my relationships with sex, my mother, and my motherland.
In our culture, motherhood is presumably sanctified, and I thought I’d experience social acceptance beyond anything I’d ever imagined. Instead, I felt under constant surveillance and yet utterly invisible....
Visually, prose tells us that we’re moving through time, through narrative or rhetoric, and visually, poetry tells us we’re moving up and down through lyric, feeling.
Perhaps like a phoenix, Martin maintains such a commanding presence throughout the book because she has endured the sacrificial fire of being a poet, the necessary self-immolation.