Reviews
RIGOBERTO GONZALEZ
from THE POETRY FOUNDATION’s Harriet Blot
“…..with its unique articulation and structures, Martínez’s book is nothing short of a breakthrough for Chicano poetics.”
JUAN FELIPE HERRERA
from AMERICAN POET vol. 38, by The Academy of American Poets
“J. Michael Martinez’s collection speaks—if that is possible—of the slippages between meaning and reality and/or realities. He delights in these investigations and he is careful, methodical, and mercurial as a metaphysical surgeon….
Unlike his forerunner, the Chicano poet of the late sixties, Alurista, Martinez does not want to exhume and monumentalize historical Mesoamerican figures, such the Toltec Prince made diety, Quetzalcoatl…..Nor does he desire to cross into the shamanic or sacred states of consciousness of the Pre-Columbian pantheon such as in the work of the late, lesbian, borderlands theorist and poet, Gloria Anzaldúa.
J. Michael Martinez has broken away. He has abandoned the project of cultural and historical reclamation.
In the last analysis, perhaps, what is surgically cut into and laid bare, or better yet, what is desired to be gathered – beyond the named body, beyond the goddess, beyond histories, beyond the mother and possibly beyond language – is an irreducible love; the master parable in this mind devouring tour-de-force.”
ERIC PANKEY
author of The Pear as One Example: New & Selected Poems
“In J. Michael Martinez’s Heredities, history is unsettled by way of the visionary hybridity that is Martinez’s method of poetic inquiry. The poems explore with a passionate lyric gorgeousness the borderlands between myth and memory, between plunder and inheritance, between the story we tell and the story we deny–this violent story of regeneration we call America.”
CARMEN GIMENEZ SMITH
author of Odalisque in Pieces
“In Heredities, Martinez mines various linguistic, mythological, and historical narratives that ‘complete themselves in one another.’ Both corporeal and heady, this collection marries the earth to the word, and revises how a twenty-first-century identity is forged with and through the past. Martinez is not only a fine poet but is also a dedicated anthropologist with the ability to excavate language from the ruins of history.”
KARLA KELSEY
author of Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary
“A contemporary articulation of construction that reveals and revels in the power of plurality and fragmentation to create a whole that transcends its magnificent parts.“