The Falling Down Dance

(Paperback)

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Description

Martin's lines are a brief as breath, and cloister us at home, in winter, where the tiny everyday ministrations of love and parenthood are magnified and abundant with meaning.

I wanted to tell you something
About the shipwreck
Of fatherhood, of motherhood, the coarse
Sugar leaving us
Shook. Soft wreck of the baby
Greeting each kiss
With an open
And drooling mouth, reflex
We don't understand
Heart-blip stuck
Tipping my finger
On the keys, speeding
Memory of yesterday out
The window I'm
Pushing barely open

Chris Martin is the author of American Music (Copper Canyon, 2007) and Becoming Weather (Coffee House Press, 2011).

Reviews

"To read The Falling Down Dance from cover to cover--and it's best read that way--is also to see a dad start separate and strive for connection, catching the baby when he falls down, or feeling like a welcome but slightly distant addition to a maternal dyad... Martin makes the clearest example for the new American poetry of fatherhood." --The Boston Review, "The Thing with Fathers" "Martin's poems traverse expansive concepts while confined to the space of an apartment, where new parents in "the shipwreck / of fatherhood, of motherhood" are cloistered during a brutal winter."--Star Tribune "In this spare, poignant collection, Martin invites readers into the microcosm of new fatherhood against a wintry backdrop that produces isolation and intimacy in turn... Martin encourages his readers to see parenthood in all its contradictions; the beautiful addition and the nexus of complication."--Publishers Weekly "The Falling Down Dance is a book of poetry so tenderly, playfully, and, often, still, sorrowfully in tune with the modern world. Ranging from Frank Ocean to fatherhood, from modern love to modern sadness, Martin's poems tilt and turn down the page, full of dance and momentum... The Falling Down Dance is a pulsing joy of a book. It feels so full, its slim lines bursting at the edges, trying to get out."--Full Stop "Martin's attention is tender, even when it is dark. In the end, though, [The Falling Down Dance] is a book that closes in on domestic moments, moments of the physical body's experiences, and these attentions manage to feel somehow profoundly political. For what is more political than the effort to create a space of love"--FIELD

Author Bio

Chris Martin is the author of American Music (Copper Canyon, 2007) and Becoming Weather (Coffee House Press, 2011). He is also the author of several chapbooks, including How to Write a Mistake-ist Poem (Brave Men, 2011), enough (Ugly Duckling, 2012), the serially released CHAT (Flying Object, 2012), and History (Coffee House Press, 2014). After editing one of the first online magazines, Puppy Flowers, for its entire ten-year run, he is now an editor at Futurepoem books and curates the response blog Futurepost.