Instructions for the Lovers

by Dawn Lundy Martin

A taught, tender collection of poems woven with sadness and loss dealing with aging, attachments, and the precarity of life.


“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.

Genres: Poetry, Queer, LGBT, African American

85 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 25, 2024

About the author

Dawn Lundy Martin is a poet, essayist, and conceptual-video artist. She is the author of four books of poems: Good Stock Strange Blood (Coffee House, 2017); Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books, 2015); which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; DISCIPLINE (Nightboat Books, 2011); A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (University of Georgia Press, 2007); and three limited edition chapbooks. Most recently, she co-edited with Erica Hunt an anthology, Letters to the Future: BLACK WOMEN / Radical WRITING (Kore Press, 2018). Her nonfiction can be found in The New Yorker, Harper's, n+1, and elsewhere. Martin is a Professor of English in the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. She is also the recipient of a 2018 NEA Grant in Creative Writing.

Reviews

[zoe · Rating 4 out of 5]

didn’t hit as hard for me as good stock strange blood but, nevertheless, dawn lundy martin is a brilliant and skilled poet and i enjoyed her meditations on lovers and loverness :-)

[Renee Morales · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ugh stunning stunning stunning

“What would the poem be without wings to block out the light?”

“If the photo is a long / song it is not the blues. Instead I’ll be home soon so / be sweet and be faithful. Hold that space for me.”

One of the best things I’ve ever read about queer sex and eroticism:
“And, yet, on / my own lips, wet like earth / or an uncovered dream, just dripping / echoic with a whole other night / call. Like a welt. There is always / here now, curled into a sofa, / a touch that is already touch, of / beasts inside the chest, flagrant / pull, the burn of it. They say, the sea grows, / its reckless imagination, a pricking like skin.”

Martin you will always be famous

[Amorak Huey · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I like secrets though. I think about the way secrets are a product of a shared. Secrets are a necessary part of how people form, locate themselves and each other. The secret is crucial for the erotic.”

[Dante]

"Maybe the lover is simply a collaborator." "We are exuberantly awake inside of being lovers."

[ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

new contender for one of my top three poetry collections. will be coming back to this again and again

[michele · Rating 5 out of 5]

i love libraries. i hadn't heard of this poet before or read any of her other works either. i was merely perusing some display shelves at my local library before i checked out my holds, and came across this arresting cover and title that instantly drew me in. i gathered nothing much from the reviews saddled on the back cover nor from the lack of a blurb. yet, when i flipped through, i was intrigued. this was a recommended book in celebration of national poetry month.

man, this was a scintillating work. each section shifting, like water, on love. each poem a world in and of itself, bleeding into each other, sharp yet wet, soft much like a bruise after the sting of a slap. i was entranced by how she used structure, played with it, poems unique yet cohesive as she moved from speaking of/to the world to the interpersonal to the intrapersonal. her use of conversation as poetry or made poetry was beautiful. i really love that idea. i loved the way she wrote, obviously a meticulous person, paying attention to her diction and the cadence it created in a piece. i think you find this very clearly in her introduction, before she truly begins. she speaks of water and personhood. it is all haunting.

i find it difficult to expound on this, to say something more specific. i feel as though she reaches in and grasps that very unspeakable thing that lives in your chest, especially if you are queer and if you gasp for love. it's the corpo(reality) of it.

i really enjoyed the first section, Service. each section had poems that sucked me in, chewed me up, and spit me out. just how i like it. i'll name the poems i enjoyed below with some of my original short thoughts as i read.


Poems I Liked by Section:

Service:
Then Death Came Like a Hammer not a Metaphor
From Which The Thing Is Made
As If — oh yeah to be a person in this world and laid bare….
No Language Suffices the Lover — dunno how to describe but yes

Instructions for the Lovers:
The Lover In Service to/In Service to the Lover — this one hit hard rn I’m crying in the club
Instructions for the Lovers Poem — hits hard, desperation, chaos, need
About Art, D+D

Notes in Relation:
Stellar section — direct and sharp, blunt impact here
*Winter
Self Care
About Secrets, D+D
Insistence on Being

The Photographs: Black Aliveness:
titular poem wow
D+S on Lovers — loved, hurts and resonates

[Skylar Miklus · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really thoughtful, mature, and cohesively conceived book. Dawn Lundy Martin is testing the limits of poetics, line, clause, and language itself. The combination of her elevated diction and her compassionate way of seeing the world made this reading experience almost like a satisfying puzzle. I particularly enjoyed the multivocal poems which seem to be crafted out of dialogue with lovers, particularly the one that ends the collection: “I used to be / full of holes looking / for other holes to / mirror my holes or / other things to fill my / holes, which were of / course unfillable.” I am so grateful to Nightboat Books for the review copy.

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading into dawn lundy martin’s work, feels like orienting yourself among a single body of work, maybe even a biology. Like each book establishes a precedent for understanding subsequent books. For instance, it’s hard for me not to hear Good Stock Strange Blood informing the structure of this book. In that book her opening piece briefly introduced these abstract characters from a play, who then subtly intone their presence as a frame, so subtly it makes a reader (like me) wonder if the frame was just a hallucination of “frame” or a diversion. That is, until I reach the second half of the book, and those abstract characters are clearly relevant and present to the poems. In a similar way, martin introduces her mother in the book’s opening. With this sense she will be honoring her actual mother throughout the book. And there is some of that.

But there’s a lot of what a mother represents. A love that informs the poet’s need for love, the poet’s desire to be held and loved, the specific nature of need, the difficulty to meet that need. At least where the book purports to give “Instructions for the Lovers,” knowing the particularities for each person’s capacity to be loved, and how that might be influenced living in 21st Century American culture as a queer Black woman, there is a sense that the “mother” of martin’s book speaks to something personal (how her mother opened her to understand love) and cultural (a “mother’s love” standing for something in artistic productions). And, significantly, how someone is going to synthesize these in their reading will be how they relate to martin’s thinking in her poems. Like, is this comparable to the feeling when you desire someone who’s absent (or they’re not present in the way you’d like them to be)?

And then culturally, there are poems subtly positioned to speak about the current politics. For instance, the poem “Self Care,” that opens: “We, annihilated by rigor, / wet close to the edges / of ornate buildings / meant to keep us safe” “Self Care” and “safety” and “obsessive chatter about Freedom” all feel pertinent to the present moment. Poems like this elaborate on the consequences culture presses onto the poet’s identity (which would then speak to the complex feelings of love). But the commentary can be a bit elusive.

Which is what the mother presence is through the book. A literal mother with loose skin appears periodically. Reminding the reader of what seems to be significant for the poet. It’s likely these poems constructing the person she is now is in light of her mother. But what’s difficult is relating them to the mother. The poems I find most formative are more the poet reflecting on some adult moment, and it’s only my understanding of martin’s previous book, and the nod to intentionality that makes it real.

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honestly not sure what these poems are about...

from Persepective is Supposed to Yield Clarity: "I let my body just wander around as if it had no mind, just // body and buzzing—the way vibration can make you hover // above yourself, and the feeling is exalted, and you don't ask // any questions at all about what life means."

from No Language Suffices the Lover: "Relieve is not being stranded in a queue, // catching another human's skin fragrances, little invisible particles // of otherness entering the nose stream, their peculiar grief // of living."

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poems that deepen under discussion and scrutiny. Themes that thread and course and invite interpretation. The collection has something to say about being in a body, developing an “I”, and coming to terms with what the mind, in love, is really doing. The non sequiturs are authoritative, masterly.

[Hannah Harper · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Do you feel like you need the lovers for something you can’t reach yourself?”

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's what Eileen Myles says on the back: I want to stay inside this place, with its words and spaces and intimate conversations.

Thank you, fellow Emotional Historian, for this recommendation.

[Dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A better than average pandemic book that sits with the intersection of physical, emotional and cerebral alienation, ‘the I’ that is condensed, quarantined, connected, shining.

[andi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this collection to be very moving and thought provoking. I loved the structure of the poems, they all felt to be written in an unorthodox style which I found very interesting.

[nestle • whatnestleread · Rating 3 out of 5]

instructions for the lovers was good but not great. it’s a poetry collection that explores feeling isolated and connected at the same time during the pandemic. it was deep and emotional without being too heavy. definitely a pleasant surprise but not exactly groundbreaking.

[Brandon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Strong layered technical writing with interweaving themes of sexuality, abuse, and love.

[André de Lannée · Rating 2 out of 5]

unoriginal manic

[Carina Stopenski · Rating 4 out of 5]

beautiful, experimental, and thought-provoking poetry right here

[Cass · Rating 5 out of 5]

"What if we're all lovers. What if we're all little books. Little consequences."
I love her work so much. I'm so thankful I read poetry.