Good Stock Strange Blood

by Dawn Lundy Martin

From Good Stock Strange Blood:

And, yet, each morning a fireheart grief in the body coming out of sleep. The listening to the smoke as if fills and weeps inside the chest, choking strength out hands weighted, dangling. We wonder where else it lives before it fills the body up. We assume it comes inside through the hole that promises invasion.

Lundy Martin is author of A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering and DISCIPLINE, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award.

Genres: Poetry, Queer

144 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2017

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

[India M. Clamp · Rating 4 out of 5]

RIP 1.1.25

"And, yet, each morning a fireheart grief in the body coming out of sleep. The listening to the smoke as if fills and weeps inside the chest, choking strength out hands weighted, dangling. We wonder where else it lives before it fills the body up."
---Dawn Lundy Martin"

[Janel D. Brubaker · Rating 5 out of 5]

I try writing down quotes from every book of poetry I read. It's a way for me to more thoroughly absorb what I'm reading, as well as look back on the book to see what stood out when I read it. I also believe this practice allows me to challenge the ways I look at literature, stretches my ability to be both critical and receptive of what I read. Some books I write down very few quotes. I am not going to be the intended audience for every book of poetry I read.

This book, I took four and a half pages of hand-written notes. To say that I devoured this book, that it hit me in tremendous ways, is to understate the impact.

This book wrestles with so many themes and subthemes, I can't list them all. Central to these poems are grief, identity (issues of gender and sexuality and race), and the always rolling/roaming/untethered relationship with our bodies. This book feels imbibed with an entire lifetime of questions and answers. It seems to look at subthemes of family, friendship, love, sex, romance, social expectations and stereotypes, etc.

And while the imagery and the writing are striking and don't hold back, the emotions evoked are subtle and almost gentle. Even when the images project violence, whether physical or emotional, there is a tenderness, a kind of heavy compassion the speaker presents to the reader:
"No monument, / only blood-earth, / warm salve to open throat-bone. / How to live between mother and time?" (pg 7).
"A narrative / wired in cells, desolate root" (pg 10).
"[We / bracket infinity]" (pg 17).
"Shiny perpendicular - my cunt wet all day - / legions of waste in my body" (pg 29).
"Only I see my stranger" (pg 30).
"I love you like a saw / into barely beating / heart" (pg 48).

I think my favorite quotes from those I've written down are these:
"Seer said, betrayal is always a symbol of the soul being upgraded" (pg 77).
"Deception is often a reciprocal activity" (pg 80).
"In order to grieve properly you must remember - even if remembering is a non-space, more like a feeling than an image. Some say writing is an act of remember what has been forever lost" (pg 88).
"To love incessantly despite the reader's inability to extract anything at all from the remnant" (pg 95).
"To mutate is to live" (pg 99)

Even typing these up right now has given me chills along my arms. There's something visceral here, something deeply carnal and rooted in grief that simply catches the collar of the reader and never lets go. Not even when the last poem is over does this book let go, and I find it magical. Natural. Nature-human focused. It's as if the speaker is using the poems to search for something; something lost, something hidden, something stolen, something broken. I have this book on my To-Read-Again pile because there was too much in it for me to absorb it all at once. It is truly a stunning piece of work.

I gave it five stars. Highly recommend.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

The four stars doesn't mean "really liked it" but rather "really got something out of it."

This is a challenging work, but because I read it for class, I watched some YouTube videos of Dawn Lundy Martin, and heard a couple presentations on the work.

There is a great deal to think about and learn from here.

[zoe · Rating 4 out of 5]

intense, emotionally rich, complex. the photographs are a touching addition. definitely want to read more by lundy martin!

[gray eden · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good Stock Strange Blood was very intensely challenging, syntactically, semantically, and symbolically. Its title comes from the title of the global collective, HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?'s short film, Good Stock on the Dimension Floor: An Opera, which was supposed to be featured at the 2014 Whitney Biennial. However, The Yam Collective withdrew, due to the Whitney's "racist and sexist curatorial practices" (i.e. the feature of Donelle Woolford, the fictional black woman caricature creation of white male artist Joe Scanlan). Much of the book's content derives from the libretto of the withdrawn piece.

The artistic context helped me very scarcely to understand what the hell is going on here, but I still am so fascinated by it. Martin warps syntax and throws our conventional semantics for a loop in order to discuss race, gender, time, space, and being.

[Frank Karioris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can not wait to see them read this weekend. That they work at the same institution is frightening in enormity.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

In reading lundy martin’s book, I struggle most figuring the book’s “Prologue” into the rest of the book. Because the “Prologue” proposes characters to a play. Like the book will be based on the performance of a play, after the writer had seen it and performed in it. And now after having written and seen and performed the play, she’s set herself to write a book of poems that would have had the play’s characters in mind. And for the first third of the book, I can assemble all lundy martin’s poetic shards or intimations or lyric accounts of the world, as they would have existed in the play.

Like I can see the birth of “Nave.” A character described in the “Prologue” as a figure born from Sarah, a character from an entirely different play. But how I read these opening poems as the birth of “Nave” is more from the long concept-shadow cast by the “Prologue,” rather than literal cues connecting the poems to the play. And I’m willing to participate in the elaborate play on implicities, because I’m interested in the relationship between the play’s characters “Land” and “Perpetuus.” Where “Perpetuus” is a reflection on or of “Land,” and “Land” is “symbolic of the way the body can be trapped by racialized existence.” I’m not sure, though, how much I can read for these characters in the book’s lyric analysis of racialized black bodies or the book’s methods of reflection on that symbol. I’m not sure if I should be reading the poems reversing the character’s role. Like in poems where the poet reckons with the implications of living with a black body, should I read that as the restraints “Land” would impose on the body? Should I see the poet’s look at her history as itself a reflection on body, like what “Perpetuus” would see reflecting the position of “Land”?

For me, this is the underlying challenge in lundy martin’s decision to foreground the book of poems by a play. Especially a play whose characters are drawn as figures of abstract concepts. On one hand, I appreciate the frame, as it adds to my reading of the various forms poems take in the book. On the other hand, that frame seems to wane in its fixedness as I move further into the book. So reading the first third of the book, the frame feels like a companion. And reading the second third, the frame feels more like Venus appearing in the morning sky—an interesting reference but not so involved in my reading. And yet, with the explicit appearance of “Perpetuus” towards the end (especially with the appearance following poems about a black body reaching into a darkness, and the indistinguishable line between the two), signals to me I should be reading the book with these figured characters in mind. And given the poems’ tendency toward abstraction, I and my normal inclination to read them as a subjective reckoning via language, I would like to lace these characters’ subjectivities into the poems.

[Renee Morales · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow. like wow. god dawn lundy martin is one of those poets who im like okay why aren't we dedicating whole lectures to her collections to trying to position ourselves in her global frame of reference to being angry with her. good stock strange blood is a collection and an afro-futurist meditation on blackness and its derivatives, its location, its weight, and its legacy. she is so scientific and methodological i had to keep googling to make sure this was a poetry collection and not a pamphlet or excerpts from some mythology or philosophy or some other abstracted piece of intellectual material. gooodddd like FUCKKKKKK shes so fucking awesome like wtf its gonna get me so mad. you read martin and you're holy fuck she is smart, and sensual, and violent, and real and its like krjthkhgkjhfgjkdhgjhfd. time for quotes because im going in circles.

"Enter suitable caged beast, / fierce in blueness, blunting / here and there. // Dear god of gorgeous rooms, I / am yours."

"how am I gonna be your dog if you keep asking me / questions?"

"sometimes only one other person knows the mechanics of the incidents compelled like desire / like i want to fuck slash kill you / like my dog chases and froths at his mouth / hey, play me a song I'm so hungry"

"To mutate is to live. // Make them spread and open to you."

i could keep going but im going to practice self-control as part of my 2024 reinvention. that is to say I would recommend reading martin if you have the chance because she is so naturally dizzying i've yet to do acid but this feels like what i'd imagine that feels like then trying to float your body on the ocean and you start to sink feeling martin's hands push up and hold you horizontal whispering "continue."

read this!!!

[Leonard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intense personal poetry (enhanced with black and white photos) that reveals the grim lives of others by a poet who is looking down in the photo provided for the book. Published by Coffee House Press in Minneapolis and we are reminded on a page at the end of the book that "Literature is not the same thing as publishing."

[Jon Nakapalau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Removing a dressing from a wound that has not yet healed; careful not to do even more damage - yet very much aware that this is a possibility. Dawn Lundy Martin reveals this wound to us, and we have to come to terms with the fact that the same collective hands that have wounded must now try to join to heal. Powerful and insightful look at compartmentalized existence.

[Diana Arterian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book deserves all the praise it receives and operates an incredibly high register of intelligence. It is simultaneously difficult to describe, but so evocative of particular feeling—it does what I love best about poetry on every single page.

[Anatoly Molotkov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant and impassioned, complicated and emotionally gripping. Dawn Lundy Martin makes the Black experience visceral and philosophical at once. A powerful collection.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poems on the body. Lot more to it but not my call. I loved this. Compare it with Rankine's Citizen, though more personal, more bruised.

[Alana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Will probably give it 5 stars upon a reread

[ASC Library]

811.6 Mar

[Gia · Rating 5 out of 5]

“- How you wrap yourself up in juicy presents and other tokens of your appreciation. I know how you stir at night dreaming of a body you can hold in your palm, however briefly before the monsoons.”

[Jessica]

“In order to grieve properly / you must remember...Some say writing is an act of remembering. / What has been forever lost. The sensations lodged in teeth cracks and / throat muscles.”