I met Chris Martin some time ago, back when I was doing a lot of readings in SF. He seemed like a nice enough kid, had a quick intelligence and I liked him. He moved to Minneapolis where he worked at Coffee House Press for a while then I heard he jumped to NYC. Just about everyone I’ve known that has moved to New York has become incommunicado. It’s like nothing & no one exists outside that city, I guess. I’ve taken to calling it the City of Lost Friends. But then I get a cryptic little email from Chris asking for my address. I send a reply, hear nothing back, & this book appears in my mailbox a few weeks thereafter. I know it ain’t the friendliest approach & yet it is contact, & I’m grateful for that.
It’s a beauty of a book w/poems that move back & forth, up & down, inside & out, w/forays into the echo chamber for those light-fingered liftings & I like it mucho. Chris Martin has his eyes, ears & heart open. The poems are written in tercets & they average roughly about 60 lines each. Lots of leaps, fakes & fade aways are built in to keep you guessing as you are propelled along the course of a free-flowing lyric that “falls into knowing” along w/you.
American Music is the winner of the Hayden Carruth Award for New & Emerging Poets…whatever the fuck that means. Weird that this book made it in one of those bullshit contest deals but here it is, all shiny & bright, as published by Copper Canyon Press. Every now & then something real slips thru.
