A Penchant for Masquerades

<p><strong>From the universal to the personal the formal to the experimental Carolyn Martin’s fourth poetry collection <em>A Penchant for Masquerades</em> takes an unflinching look at the fluidity of truth time identity history death and relationships.</strong></p><p> </p><p><strong>Martin time-travels with Neanderthals Lucy and Big Foot to 9/11 to the future collapse of a holographic universe. She mines scientific discoveries nursery rhymes biblical characters and the works of Issa Horace Yeats Frost Williams Szymborska and Collins in poems that are both playful and thought-provoking.</strong></p><p> </p><p><strong>Since she believes reincarnation is a distinct possibility she suggests that death need not be taken too seriously (“Re-Entry Interview” “A Case for Sudden Death”). She riffs on an Issa haiku (“Thoughts on a Translation”) sits down to dinner with Horace (“Notes from a Water Drinker”) and promises literary revenge on a reviewer who negatively critiques this collection (“To the Reviewer Who Missed Too Much”).</strong></p><p> </p><p><strong>Martin’s forms run the gamut from sonnets haiku and pantoums to free verse found poetry and paratactic poems whose stanzas can be read in any order. A lover of language she builds poems based on one word  (“Phonaethetics” “Disambiguation” “Stirring”) and delights in re-stitching the words of others in surprising ways (“Variations on Final Words” “10 Variations on the 50 Most Quoted Lines of Poetry” “90+ Titles Appropriated from Poetry 180 Hosted by Billy Collins”).</strong></p><p> </p><p><strong>A lover of all things poetic Martin has created an eclectic collection for readers who have a penchant for words and who are open to believing in everything and nothing.</strong></p>