The Spare Room by Dana Guthrie Martin is an artfully woven and disturbingly resonant suite of twenty poems that mix myth with real life in unlikely ways and draw uniquely thought provoking parallels between torture scenes, sideshow attractions, scientific anomalies, and what it means to be a contemporary female trying to stake out her existence as an individual and as a partner. Sex, pain, isolation, and temptation are just some of the hot button themes Dana Guthrie Martin deals with in this unflinching, intense, and brutally poetic collection.
The wonderfully unsettling cover art for the chapbook is by Keith Part2ism Hopewell.
The cover art is printed upon light gray deckle-edged paper, the innards are printed on good quality text paper, your chapbook will be ribbon-bound by hand and then tied with an additional expanse of ribbon or jute twine or elastic trim in a flourish of artistic bondage.
Here is one of the blurbs from the book's back cover, to offer another take on the compelling content of this collection:
"Remember the first time you pried off the cover of an IBM PS/2, only to discover darkness where the spark should be? Reading Dana Guthrie Martin’s poems will result in the exact opposite effect. The Spare Room shimmers with intensity, from the quiet chronicle of an everyday moment turned hyperbolic, to a litany organized into its own grid. These are poems of the body that do not divorce the body from the mind, beckoning: “slip your hands :: where they don’t belong.”
—Mary Biddinger, author of Prairie Fever and Saint Monica
Here is the title poem from the collection:
The Spare Room
Here is where I bend over. This blue room.
This daybed. Here is where I tremble.
This parquet floor. This sheet set.
After they pull me apart, they slide
ligatures through my skin, sew me up with raffia.
After they block my mouth with mothballs,
they glad-hand their accusers. Skin is disinfected,
wrapped in oil cloth. Decoys are made to wick antifreeze.
Here is where I throb. This orifice. This hollow.
They caudle what’s inedible. I swallow.
I bleat out my dark rhythms for trespassers.
I am lubricated with grossulin and seep
like wounded trees. Epoxy sets what should
be expunged. Knuckles only stop at bone.
See the Blood Pudding Press etsy shop for more imagery and buying details.
Blood Pudding Press is also a fan of book trades, art swaps, and review copies. please feel free to enquire.
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