Forgotten Lands

After her acclaimed debut, Lauren Martin returns with a luminous second collection that speaks from the stillness of a life irrevocably changed. Following a spinal cord injury that left her mostly bedridden, Martin turned inward—into her spiritual practice and her poetry.

Rooted in the West African tradition of Ifà, and honoring the Òrìsà who walk with her, these poems explore love and loss, isolation and faith, illness and the body, and what it means to be marginalized both physically and spiritually.

With a voice that is at once melodic and raw, Martin moves between verse, haiku, and prose with lyrical precision. Her work sings with reverence for nature, for God’s presence in all forms, and for the power of language to carry us through even the most unthinkable transformations.

Forgotten Lands is poetry as prayer, as protest, as survival. It is a testament to the beauty that endures in humanity and the natural world when everything else shifts and falls away.