From ORDER, Dawn Lundy Martin

In the words of Fanny Howe, Dawn Lundy Martin’s poetry is “dense and deep . . . necessary, and hot on the eye.” Line, sentence, and stanza cohere in this sequence—taken from a longer series—that considers the body as site of “contained delightfulness” and terror.

An excerpt:

Order, we know, is love. Without clothes the

body feels its own flesh suddenly. To imagine fear

when it’s not present is to evoke the erotic, is to

prepare, a cool wet cloth on the body’s surface,

a cleansing, a room is tied down, a single chair as

anchor.

DAWN LUNDY MARTIN is author of A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize (University of Georgia Press, 2007), Discipline, winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize (Nightboat Books: 2011), and the forthcoming Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books, 2014). She lives in Pittsburgh, PA.