Sparrow and Other Eulogies

Sparrow and Other Eulogies is thrilling in its push against loss with every tool and tone--from grief to anger to embitterment to invention to farce to hope to mirth.  There is no well-lit path as her poems stumble toward truths, which appear in the most unlikely places and under the most unseemly of circumstances.  Even as substance vanishes, words emerge as "ointments, parachutes, fresh sheets."  Only a master poet can accomplish such a replenishment--and Megan Martin does so with the intensity of Rilke and the desperately comic energy of Lucille Ball eating candy off a speeded-up conveyor belt. -MAXINE CHERNOFF Megan Martin is a docent in the loss museum, where in the off-hours she taxidermies ghosts, plumps them with word-stuffs, and casts them in dioramas reanimation doesn't hesitate to visit on a nightly basis and sometimes even during the day. But, amidst the play, Martin reminds us exhibits are found not only in museums, but also in courtrooms, where we're asked to examine evidence of the violence narratives suffer at the hands of loss. If these pieces oscillate between a will to play and a mandate to mourn, on this court, resilience is the referee, and we're in the bleachers, applauding its every call. -KRISTI MAXWELL Myth, fairytale, love story: Megan Martin's Sparrow & Other Eulogies in uncategorizable and incomparable. Her lyrical and surprising choices pull you into a meditation on memory and mourning, with all of the hilarity, playfulness, and weight that truly accompanies those experiences. I didn't stop reading till I was done, and you shouldn't either: I found a million little toe-holds to build my own narrative within her loosely constructed--but intricate and structurally complex--world. -SARAH EATON