Lauren Martin
Author
Night of the Hawk
Written for anyone who has experienced the isolation and marginalization that can accompany both illness and deep spiritual pursuit, this stunning collection of poetry is at once a tender homage to Yorùbá culture and the religion Ifá, a clear-eyed examination of modern-day America’s sociopolitical landscape, and a raw account of the author’s own journey through a frequently inhospitable world.
“Lauren’s poems drop into your psyche and ripple outward, echoing in the moments of life. Their beauty haunts. She explores both all-too-human realities and spiritual aspirations. The Visible and Invisible reflecting one another. The surface and the depths. The sacred and the vile. In the interaction of the poles of these paradoxes, the mystical mind emerges and is drawn out in daily experience. Lauren is not afraid to ask the hard human questions of Spirit and not afraid to expect spiritual meaning of messy human encounters.”
— Sallie Ann Glassman
Head Manbo Asogwe of La Source Ancienne Ounfo
“Night of the Hawk is a luminous and numinous collection about women and men, about betrayal and forbearance, about endurance, death, and art, and, most essentially, about the search for a sacred path through life. There is so much love in these poems; the jeweled lines sparkle and sing off the page—sometimes playful, sometimes frightening in their honesty, but always tender in their forgiveness of human foibles. Ms. Martin’s voice is oracular, and her poems insist on their dignity and mystery even as they shoot on a zipline, fast and nimble, to your heart. She tells the truth, but as her forebear famously advised, she tells it slant. These are painful poems, but healing ones.”
— Michael Laurence
Award-winning playwright of Hamlet in Bed,
Krapp39, and Cincinnatus
