Night of the Hawk: Poems

(Paperback)

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When I have wandered long enough what am I still beholden to

If. Nature. Illness. Love. Loss. Misogyny. Aging. Africa. Our wounded planet. In this sweeping yet intensely personal collection, Lauren Martin tells the untold stories of the marginalized, the abused, the ill, the disabledthe different. Inspired by her lifes experiences, including the isolation she has suffered as a result both of living with chronic illness and having devoted herself to a religion outside the mainstream, these poems explore with raw vulnerability and unflinching honesty what it is to live aparteven as one yearns for connection.

But Night of the Hawk is no lament; it is powerful, reverential, sometimes humorous, often defiantOh heat me and fill me / I rise above linesand full of wisdom. Visceral and stirring, the poems in this collection touch on vastly disparate subjects but are ultimately unified in a singular quest: to inspire those who read them toward kindness, compassion, and questioning.

Reviews

"Lauren's poems drop into your psyche and ripple outward, echoing in the moments of life. Their beauty haunts. She explores both all-too-human realities and spiritual aspirations. The Visible and Invisible reflecting one another. The surface and the depths. The sacred and the vile. In the interaction of the poles of these paradoxes, the mystical mind emerges and is drawn out in daily experience. Lauren is not afraid to ask the hard human questions of Spirit and not afraid to expect spiritual meaning of messy human encounters."
--Sallie Ann Glassman, Head Manbo Asogwe, La Source Ancienne Ounfo

"Night of the Hawk is a luminous and numinous collection about women and men, about betrayal and forbearance, about endurance, death, and art, and, most essentially, about the search for a sacred path through life. There is so much love in these poems; the jeweled lines sparkle and sing off the page--sometimes playful, sometimes frightening in their honesty, but always tender in their forgiveness of human foibles. Ms. Martin's voice is oracular, and her poems insist on their dignity and mystery even as they shoot on a zipline, fast and nimble, to your heart. She tells the truth, but as her forebear famously advised, she tells it slant. These are painful poems, but healing ones.
--Michael Laurence, award-winning playwright of Hamlet in Bed, Krapp39, and Cincinnatus

Author Bio

Lauren Martin is a psychotherapist, poet, and devoted ynf. She studied poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. She spent years writing without submitting her work due to a long shamanic journey that led her to both If and the writing of this collection of poems. Lauren lives in Oakland, California.