Love, Death, and In Between

by Martyna Dearing

94 pages, Paperback

Published February 14, 2024

Reviews

[Sarah Tollok · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dearing's poetry uses straightforward, relatable images and language to draw the reader into the much more complicated and amorphous world of the in between. The poet is young, but a widow; looking forward, but longing for what was; invincible and powerful but broken and crumbling. Dearing holds space for being all of these things at once, and leaves room for becoming something entirely new and yet unknown.

Personally, I feel she accomplishes the most in her shortest poems. Her three and four line works are each more than the sum of their parts. I also love that she put the title of each poem as a tag line at the end. They don't give anything away in advance, and do the double duty of both title and epitaph.