A new book is born!

It happens this way …

A PENCHANT FOR MASQUERADES by Carolyn Martin — Poetry Released by Local Writer

Portland, OR — February 12, 2019 — Unsolicited Press announced immediate availability of A Penchant for Masquerades by Carolyn Martin, a collection of playful and provocative poems.

From the universal to the personal, the formal to the experimental, Carolyn Martin’s fourth poetry collection, A Penchant for Masquerades, takes an unflinching look at the fluidity of truth, time, identity, history, death, and relationships.

Martin time-travels with Neanderthals, Lucy, and Big Foot to 9/11 to the future collapse of a holographic universe. She mines scientific discoveries, nursery rhymes, biblical characters, and the works of Issa, Horace, Yeats, Frost, Williams, Szymborska, and Collins in poems that are both playful and thought-provoking.

Since she believes reincarnation is a distinct possibility, she suggests that death need not be taken too seriously (“Re-Entry Interview,” “A Case for Sudden Death”). She riffs on an Issa haiku (“Thoughts on a Translation”), sits down to dinner with Horace (“Notes from a Water Drinker”), and promises literary revenge on a reviewer who negatively critiques this collection (“To the Reviewer Who Missed Too Much”).

Martin’s forms run the gamut from sonnets, haiku, and pantoums to free verse, found poetry, and paratactic poems whose stanzas can be read in any order. A lover of language, she builds poems based on one word (“Phonaethetics,” “Disambiguation,” “Stirring”), and delights in re-stitching the words of others in surprising ways (“Variations on Final Words,” “10 Variations on the 50 Most Quoted Lines of Poetry,” “90+ Titles Appropriated from Poetry 180 Hosted by Billy Collins”).

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Join me for the launch of A Penchant for Masquerades at the Milwaukie Poetry Series at the Pond House on March 13, 2019 from 6:30 — 8:00 p.m. Click here for directions.

Can’t make that evening? I’ll be reading at the Free Range Poetry Series on April 1 at the Thurman Library. Open mic starts at 6:00 p.m. Featured readers at 6:30 p.m. Click here for directions.

Like to purchase a copy of A Penchant for Masquerades at the pre-publication price? No problem. Click here. I’ll pay for shipping!