Description
Splitting Open the World
by Carolyn Martin
Carolyn Martin’s sixth poetry collection, Splitting Open the World, borrows its title from Muriel Rukeyser’s question, What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open. Recognizing that in this wobbly universe, truths strain, turn, twist/to revise themselves, Martin explores a world split open in poems about family and friends, about life as an English teacher and Roman Catholic nun, and about the inspiration lurking in the everyday. Both accessible and musical, wise and witty, her poems affirm the power of poetry to evoke emotion, provoke thought, and connect readers more deeply to the world and to themselves.
WHAT THEY’RE SAYING…
How do we become who we are? In order to find out, Carolyn Martin interrogates her past (“the girl / who can’t keep words in her mouth”) and follows its path to her present. Along the way, she uncovers truths, never turning away from her own flaws. At the center of her investigation is her long-lived mother, who “mapped / her way around constraint, found its edge, and flew.” Part memoir, part elegy, Splitting Open the World is another rich and welcome collection by a stellar poet.
—Andrea Hollander, author of And Now, Nowhere But Here
“Poetry is just the evidence of life,” said Leonard Cohen. “If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.” Carolyn Martin’s Splitting Open the World is a bonfire of illuminated reckoning, reconciliation, and redemption. As this buoyant speaker transmutes the agonies of witness to the grace of wisdom, the reader is also transformed. We are “Free to stand / outside [ourselves] and revel in ecstasy” with her as loss, grief, and shame are eclipsed by wonder and possibility. This collection splits open our world, then makes it whole again in a feast of astonishment.
—Sage Cohen, author of Writing the Life Poetic
In the epigraph to Carolyn Martin’s Splitting Open the World, Muriel Rukeyser asks, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” In this spectacular collection, Martin admits that “in this wobbly universe, truths strain, turn, twist to revise themselves” as she wrangles with the truths about her relationship with her mother, her various loves, and her careers as a nun, teacher, and business woman.
She demonstrates her deep empathy for all lives around her––from her six-year-old Ethiopian neighbor to a homeless woman on a highway ramp to a tiger at the San Diego Safari Park. In one stunning image after another, she flings her generosity wide to include all life on earth affected by climate change where “Every living thing is scrambling to memorize seasons that won’t stand still.” Everyone who enters these pages will delight in these poems and become better people in the process.
—Colette Tennant, Ph.D., author of Sweet Gothic
Splitting Open the World is also available to purchase:
Meredith Kirkwood –
In this beautiful collection, Carolyn Martin not only splits open the world, she illuminates it. With a confident voice—always ready to be awed, always ready to ask a hard question—Martin pulls metaphors from the details of closely examined experience. We come with her to bury her mother’s ashes (which are “heavier than [she] thought,”), to watch the sun on the Oregon coast glint “off the wings of seventy Western gulls streaming/down littoral space like confetti,” and to talk with her neighbors (“I’ll confer with the newborn down the street…which crater on the moon holds a cache of dreams”). We meet an alcoholic uncle whom God refuses to damn, a poetry student destined to outstrip her, a complicated mother whose “scars served her well,” and many other fascinating characters. Read these readable poems. See these people and places through her eyes. You will be glad you did.