Angelicus

“What a gift Angelicus is to us. . . . In this, Martin’s most exploratory and creative volume of poems yet, the angels speak volumes: . . . as avengers and jokesters ‘play[ing] on the edge of anarchy’ as well as compassionate witnesses to human frailty ‘scheming to undermine grief.’ Like his clever angels, Martin’s lines ‘spiral’ as they make ‘criss-cross flights’ across the pages, providing deft, inevitable rhymes and inventive turns of phrase alike. And most of all, these earnest angels know their place as ‘mere messengers’ . . . reminding us that ‘[n]o angel or demon / can separate [us] from the love of the Lord.’”


—Julie L. Moore, author of Full Worm Moon





“This is not a book about angels; it is a book of angels, one that promises to bend your imagination open to a wider frame of angelic—and human—experience than you’d previously dared to know. . . . Through the eyes of Martin’s angels, quirky and unpredictable as these messengers are wont to be, we come to glimpse familiar things in the dappled light of paradox. . . . In poem after poem we find ourselves called to upend a merely critical reason and enter, through the poet’s wit, a realm of vision where we begin to recognize how it is that ‘[s]o often you look at something / without really seeing it.’ This is a book that calls us to look again, expecting to see in ways that widen our apprehension of the truth . . . and might well remake us for the better.”


—Mark S. Burrows, author of The Chance of Home





“Martin has found his poetic voice, voicing the angels. These are celestial beings who know how to play with words, who love to alliterate, rap internal rhymes, and turn deft and memorable phrases. And they do it all with passion and wit, while never for a moment losing sight of the profound seriousness of their mission from God to us children of clay, and working tirelessly behind the scenes and before our unseeing eyes, keeping their keen yet sympathetic sights on all that makes us human and flawed, noble and delusional, and somehow still mightily loved by our Creator.  . . A heavenly host of praises for these poems, and this book.”


—John Terpstra, author of Mischief





“In alternating moves—flights of fancy and sudden gravity—Martin offers a fine contemporary take regarding our surround of messengers.”


—Scott Cairns, author of Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems