“Dawn Lundy Martin’s poems read like a real-time excavation of what poetry can and can’t do,” writes Maggie Nelson. In Instructions for The Lovers, her most stripped down, direct work to date, Martin creates a poetic field dense with thought, image, and sound as she reflects on her relationship with her mother, experiences of queer polyamory, lesbian sex, and the racist conditions within the dying American university system. With rigorously embodied vulnerability and virtuosity, Martin constructs moments of pleasure, humor, and sexiness woven with grief—a tender body to live in."

Dawn Lundy Martin’s dark brilliance subsumes in the “tissue / breath that heaves, into a depth so black we cannot reach it—” echoing William Kentridge’s meditations on the artist’s dedication to the image via Géricault’s renderings of many decapitations. Martin mines in “a sewn language” where “defeat is inevitable,” and “freedom” is “near total alienation,” revealing hope in Instructions for The Lovers—a “subjectitude,” Martin’s singular voice, gesture, art: “fragrance like sun or metal—the I’s sublime coma— .’’ This is an incredible masterpiece.

Dawn Lundy Martin is an American poet and essayist. She is the author of five books of poems: Instructions for The Lovers, Good Stock Strange Blood, winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life, which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; DISCIPLINE, A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering, and three limited edition chapbooks. Her nonfiction can be found in n+1, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Believer, and Best American Essays 2019 and 2021. Martin was the first person to hold the Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair in English at the University of Pittsburgh where she co-founded and directed the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. She is currently working on memoir titled When a Person Goes Missing, forthcoming from Pantheon Books. She is Professor and Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.