Unsound

Poetry. LGBT Studies. Martenson's poems are narratives of thinking. They are landscapes in which abstract concepts have the presence and force of physical objects--you may hit your head on them. The focus is on dissonance, whether between perception and received ideas, between feelings and convention, between lesbian identity and social prejudice, or between the desire to make the world orderly, intelligible, and finding the systems for doing so wanting and ambiguity everywhere. The diverse forms push against words in single file, against the ways syntax projects coherence and smoothes over disjunctions.