Instructions for the Lovers

"The body is the anchor in this collection—its wants, needs, pain, lust. Language becomes a medium through which the speaker explores the relationship between desire, love, fear, grief, and the impermanence of the human condition."

—Leonora Simonovis, Harriet Books

"Martin’s avant-garde fifth volume employs a fragmented form that invites readers to explore epicurean—and sometimes hedonistic—complexity and vulnerability. . . This charismatic collection explores the phenomenological complexities of human connection."

—Publishers Weekly

"I look forward to spending time with this one: the poems in Instructions for Lovers look to be intimate and bodily, yet textural and textual in the approach to language."

—Rebecca Morgan Frank, Lit Hub's "Poetry Books to Read in 2024" 

"[A] chamber of queer love, sexuality, sensuality, and long-term polyamory. . . This sexy book exudes tremendous regard, companionship, contemplation, vulnerability, trust, and years and years of experience loving and being loved." 

—Fahima Ife, The Rumpus

"Incisive, instructive. . . Instructions for The Lovers is not (just) about love as an act of resistance. Instead it. . . allows us to name love as it's experienced—not dictated."—Heather Bowlan, Anarchist Review of Books

"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." 

—Ronaldo V. Wilson

"I gladly and gratefully take instruction from a mind as fine and darting as Dawn Lundy Martin’s. Her new book of poems—a spinning, aloft creation, akin to Mallarmé in its suspension and hovering—is filled with randy, tender, radical, and history-making observations. She keeps shifting the angle of vision and articulation, so the reader can always be surprised and enlightened by how this alert litany, this poetic construction, this fragmented manifesto, arrived at its final form. This book is a sieve through which the future might be said to fall, with a sound like salvation." 

—Wayne Koestenbaum

"This book is a philosophical wish that begins losing its shit, quietly, authoritatively. It’s a reading experience I wanted to stay in—the sensation of being in a body built by language—no poem ever finished, but the most hopeful thing I ever read for a very long while. I wish this book was 1,000 pages long but I’m just going to stick it to another one, her prior, then the next and the next." 

—Eileen Myles

"Precarity, absence, edifice." 

—Karla J. Strand, Ms. Magazine

“Dawn Lundy Martin’s poems read like a real-time excavation of what poetry can and can’t do; how the past is never past; how to stand in the blur, the ‘griefmouth’ of personal and collective pain and somehow—against all odds—make thought, make fury, make song. We need this resilience, this bloody reckoning, this wit and nuance, now.” 

—Maggie Nelson

 “When can poetic discipline help to push us beyond just being the instruments of our own subjugation? When might sustained poetic vigilance end up boxing us out from ‘the very thing that shimmers just beyond what’s visible to the attentive eye’? When I want to ask such questions, I pose them to Dawn Lundy Martin.” 

—Andy Fitch, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Martin uses a whiplash of short, punched-at-us phrases that offer a powerful sense of African American history and the struggle to define oneself for oneself, not as others would.” 

—Library Journal