Amelia Martens's prose poems reveal expansive ideas in compressed language. From the domestic to the geopolitical, from the mundane to the miraculous, these brief vignettes take the form of prayers, parables, confessions, and revelations. Intimate and urgent, Martens's poems are strange, darkly funny, and utterly beguiling.
Amelia Martens is the author of the chapbooks Purgatory (Black Lawrence Press, 2012), Clatter (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2013), and A Series of Faults (Finishing Line Press, 2014). She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University, and lives in Paducah, Kentucky, where she teaches at West Kentucky Community & Technical College.
Industry Reviews
One of Literary Hub's 10 New Must-Read Collections
Entropy Magazine's Ultimate Summer Reading List
"Martens centers her debut collection of quietly poignant prose poems on family, religion, and myth as she seeks a fragile safety in an uncertain, violent world....Martens's stripped-down language is her greatest asset.... [C]harming and often profound... the personal touches soar, evidence of a solid poet finding her voice."
-Publishers Weekly
"Whether she is proffering chilling indications of an apocalypse, agonizing over an earnest apology, or conjuring the latent melancholy of bedtime, [Martens] remains both playful and precise, at once whimsical and commanding.... As tangible as it is surreal."
-Booklist
"Martens moves from the beautiful, imperfect moments of domesticity...to issues of global urgency. Often, as she waxes intimately philosophical, Martens embraces both family and the political.... VERDICT: An accomplished start-up from a poet to watch."
-Library Journal, "Summer Poetry: 13 Smart New Collections from Debut and Veteran Authors Alike"
"The Spoons in the Grass are There to Dig a Moat is a book of prose poetry that packs a mighty punch for such a slim volume (64 pages, folks). Her writing is unassuming and unpretentious as, again and again, she reaches into the mundane and pulls out the extraordinary."
-Literary Hub "Ten New Must-Read Collections"
"Amelia Martens' richly imaginative first book... will likely be one of this year's best debuts.... Grim assessments, juxtaposed with domestic studies that celebrate the whimsy and innocence of young daughters, render The Spoons in the Grass Are There to Dig a Moat a dizzying little book that yearns for escapism even as it insists on documenting our self-destruction.... Wondrous imagination, political astuteness, and refreshingly original voice."
-Plume Poetry
"At times wry, other times heartbroken, the speakers in these prose poems see tragedy and the potential for it everywhere....This material could easily fall flat or devolve into sentimentality, but Martens illuminates these stories from a different angle, using them to convey the distant witness of a worried mother."
-Barrelhouse
"In scenes pastoral and domestic...it reaches through the surreal in order to grasp some of the most exasperating, painful aspects of our daily lives.The Spoons in the Grass is overwhelming, and heartbreaking-a book that processes, through the unique mind of its author...losses upon losses, the love and impossibility of children, and a frequently alarming, but always strangely accurate, depiction of the country we live in."
-Monkey Bicycle
"You'll never read a more playful book of doomsday poems than Amelia Martens's The Spoons in the Grass Are There to Dig a Moat. Martens's dark humor is delightfully paired with her astute observations of quiet pleasures. Her poems are grand with sweeping cosmic battles and frequent mentions of death and the end times, while also intricately small."
-South 85
"A powerful and original collection."-Maurice Manning
"Wise, joyous, keen, tender. . . . She shows us the divine in the most unexpected places."-Catherine Bowman
"Heartbreaking and hilarious. . . . Martens is a magician and her magic is potent." -Richard Cecil
"Amelia Martens is one of a kind, a true original, a rare star."-Nin Andrews
