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Life in a Box is a Pretty Life
Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life continues leading American poet Dawn Lundy Martin's investigation into what is produced in the interstices between the body, experience, and language, and how alternative narratives can yield some other knowledge about what it means to be black & queer in contemporary America.
104 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 2014
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446 people want to read
About the author
Dawn Lundy Martin
26 books49 followersDawn 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.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
January 25, 2016
I don't eve know how to talk about this collection but it's definitely one i want to come back to because there are so many powerful lines and truths all around on history and our current state today as well as the self. I'm very eager to pick up more of Martin's work.
February 29, 2016
"When they said they'd split me in two, I was overjoyed, wanting to get at the rip of things.
How to inhabit the sensation of living.
__We are without allegiance. We are royal in our independence.__
When the I speaks, it speaks into an other's speech. This is a labor. Next to her, a learned man is gray and wearing comfortable shoes. He does not think about the shoes, he simply wears them. he seeps. it's impossible to determine the monument of his instructional value.
They can't figure out why the rapes keep happening.
Blood point of needle. Carnal hovering. It is we who say, "they were protected" and at the same time "fetish." "
I love the way this book implies its truths, and here I think it is pretty clear, though there were many other times when I felt like everything was pointing to something right outside my frame of reference and try as I might I couldn't put it together, quite. Would benefit from a re-reading, but still there are these searing moments, this anger, outrage, complicity, rebellion, fact-stating, bravery that is undeniable and powerful. Something I wish to see more of in poetry.
How to inhabit the sensation of living.
__We are without allegiance. We are royal in our independence.__
When the I speaks, it speaks into an other's speech. This is a labor. Next to her, a learned man is gray and wearing comfortable shoes. He does not think about the shoes, he simply wears them. he seeps. it's impossible to determine the monument of his instructional value.
They can't figure out why the rapes keep happening.
Blood point of needle. Carnal hovering. It is we who say, "they were protected" and at the same time "fetish." "
I love the way this book implies its truths, and here I think it is pretty clear, though there were many other times when I felt like everything was pointing to something right outside my frame of reference and try as I might I couldn't put it together, quite. Would benefit from a re-reading, but still there are these searing moments, this anger, outrage, complicity, rebellion, fact-stating, bravery that is undeniable and powerful. Something I wish to see more of in poetry.
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September 20, 2017I'm not saying I understood every thing exactly but it feels important to keep reading, and rereading.
July 17, 2023
A formally interesting collection that pokes at frames, boxes, and categories while purposefully refusing to cohere on any recognizable terms of its own. It's a book of fragments and pieces that don't fit together, and a number of the pieces are compelling in their own right. I wish the "structured absences" of blackness and the way sin which limitations simultaneously generate and constrain, both of which are touched on here, were more of a focus; I guess I wanted deeper, not wider. What do we do once we recognize the box, the limitation, the social constructedness and the absence that lies in opposition to that construction? What comes after deconstruction? How does it interact with the material reality of the world (which again is touched on in this collection's focus on bodies, containers in their own right, but that I wanted more of)?
Maybe I need to sit with the frustration of the absence this collection intentionally creates for longer, prod at what that absence is doing (I upgraded my rating by a star in the process of writing this review), what about Martin's experience can't be articulated within the boxes that exist within the world and the lack of an intelligible, coherent self within these pages is an expression of that, but I also think I maybe just read this in a place where I want something more than deconstruction, as wonderful an illustration of the concept as this collection seems to be. Or at least, I want deconstruction that goes as far as Derrida advocated, that identifies the dualistic oppositions and then proposes a third, new term that opposes the dualism in the first place as the necessary end of this kind of analysis. Maybe this collection does that and I need to revisit it, but I'm not there yet, I suppose.
Maybe I need to sit with the frustration of the absence this collection intentionally creates for longer, prod at what that absence is doing (I upgraded my rating by a star in the process of writing this review), what about Martin's experience can't be articulated within the boxes that exist within the world and the lack of an intelligible, coherent self within these pages is an expression of that, but I also think I maybe just read this in a place where I want something more than deconstruction, as wonderful an illustration of the concept as this collection seems to be. Or at least, I want deconstruction that goes as far as Derrida advocated, that identifies the dualistic oppositions and then proposes a third, new term that opposes the dualism in the first place as the necessary end of this kind of analysis. Maybe this collection does that and I need to revisit it, but I'm not there yet, I suppose.
October 11, 2023
imagine myung mi kim but with a lot more blood and a lot more immediately at stake. what dawn lundy martin accomplishes in Life in a Box is a translation of pain and subjectivity and imprisonment with Black femininity and Black queerness that I can't even begin to communicate without losing my sense of mind, which the book itself urges you to, as it guides you in deathly process toward insanity. i could quote lines from this book forever and never feel satisfied, so I'll only leave you with a couple.
"A dead fawn under machinery. I am the machinery. Am also the end / of the sentence."
"I will not sing to you. I refuse to sing to you."
"Order, we know, is love. Without clothes the body feels its own flesh / suddenly."
what Martin is able convey about desperation, hurt, frustration, and rage is something so unique and rich. this book will become a bible to me.
"A dead fawn under machinery. I am the machinery. Am also the end / of the sentence."
"I will not sing to you. I refuse to sing to you."
"Order, we know, is love. Without clothes the body feels its own flesh / suddenly."
what Martin is able convey about desperation, hurt, frustration, and rage is something so unique and rich. this book will become a bible to me.
Read
February 17, 2021 A woman stands naked in the corner of an art studio. She is leaning into the crevice, surrounded by the sharp ninety-degree angles of the white walls – far from passive, her arm is arched over her head, one knee slightly bent. She is posing gracefully, sensually. A man is in the foreground. He is clothed. He holds his head in his hands or, he looks straight ahead, hand on hip. Paintings fill much of the space between the man and the woman, implying that the man is an artist, that this woman is his subject. It is impossible to argue that, although the woman inhabits the distant corner of this image, she is at its center. She is what pulls the observer’s gaze – even, this moment implies, the gaze of the man who is turned away from her. And yet, in actuality, the tableaux I describe is the work of performance based artist, Carrie Mae Weems. She is, in fact, the nude woman in the corner, impossible to ignore. Who, then, is framing whom? Who is the model and who is the artist? Can the violence of the male gaze, particularly directed at women of color, be subverted, perhaps through the more productive and reciprocal relationship of staring? It is this visual text Dawn Lindy Martin doesn’t merely evoke, but places squarely in front of the mind’s eye of her readers.
In the first poem of her collection, Life in a Box is a Pretty Life Martin begins:
“MO[DERN] [FRAME] OR A PHILOSOPHICAL TREATISE ON
WHAT REMAINS BETWEEN HISTORY AND THE LIVING
BREATHING BLACK HUMAN FEMALE
After Carrie Mae Weem’s Framed by Modernism (1996)” (1).
Martin cries out to her readers in all caps, asking them to see the black human female, how living breathing women of color have carved out their own space despite attempts to confine both their bodies and their minds, addressing systemic and individual attempts to reduce black human females to bodies made of muscle, bone, sexual organs. Most importantly, Martin teachers her readers how to read her work. Martin goes on to write, “To feel a presence, they say, can be like a haunting” (1). This line introduces an ambiguity that permeates her work. Whose haunting presence is Martin addressing? The living, breathing white human male? Perhaps. The question, who is haunting who, is couched in the lines, “What would we do without her? How would we know ourselves?” (1). Martin stares back from the male gaze with these questions.
The critic and poet, Sueyeun Juliette Lee accurately describes Martin’s work as, “challenging, evocative, necessary.” Most challenging is Dawn Lundy Martins ability to provoke her reader, to make them feel uncomfortable and yet strangely satisfied upon reading her poems. The use of parataxis in many of her poems builds a momentum that doesn’t let up. And the boxed form of many of the poems in the collection can give the reader an almost claustrophobic feeling at times. However, this claustrophobic feeling is paradoxically liberating for what it does not allow to be said. In one of her poems published on the Poetry Society of America website, she writes of “The hardness of silence, its tremendous matter, the nothing that is some thing, and of its coming.” This, I think, is what the occasional un-pretty repetition of the form did to and for me.
Her work is containment within containment created through the use of quotes, for example – “black”, “brown”, “blackness”, “poor” – and the brackets that contain phrases and sentences such as “[The body in the basement is bobbled with welts. It cries and cries in a wet corner. We must leave this in the well]” (14). Or, even more striking are the brackets that contain blacked out words or nothing at all. This effect is not one that seems to replicate a series of nested boxes but, rather, a tesseract. With language, Martin makes moves from representation to perception, turning into systemic repression, turning outward into resistance, turning vertically into history, turning horizontally into the present moment into erasure, into what needs to be written. These moves ultimately force what is not said to seep out of the edges.
Throughout the text, Martin’s incorporation of language from texts such as “The Degeneracy of the American Negro”; “The Negro Question”; and Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro are not called out explicitly, as she does with the work of Carrie Mae Weem. An intentional and self conscious calling attention to the way language is used in an attempt to disembody women of color –the way the humanity, dignity, sexual autonomy, safety is compromised, of course, by violent acts, but also by and through language, Particularly the written word. The texts she incorporates were written to indoctrinate, to weave an anthropological and historical narrative. But, beneath Martin’s pen, the racist, paternalistic language of these texts then is repurposed. She writes, “For thousands of/years there lies/behind the race one/dreary, unrelieved,/ monotonous chapter/of ignorance, nakedness,/superstition, savagery” (55). The speaker in the next line exclaims, “When we encounter the savage, we are in reverie” (55). She calls out the authors of these texts as well as the larger white “we” and turns their own language on them, pointing out their need for daydreaming and conjuring an other, again, in order to define themselves as “pristine.”
It is particularly poignant to me that words such as “white” and “whiteness” are absent. However, the words and their connotations loom around the poems. The white space pushing up against the neatly boxed poems make Martin’s resistance and empowerment all the more impactful.
In the first poem of her collection, Life in a Box is a Pretty Life Martin begins:
“MO[DERN] [FRAME] OR A PHILOSOPHICAL TREATISE ON
WHAT REMAINS BETWEEN HISTORY AND THE LIVING
BREATHING BLACK HUMAN FEMALE
After Carrie Mae Weem’s Framed by Modernism (1996)” (1).
Martin cries out to her readers in all caps, asking them to see the black human female, how living breathing women of color have carved out their own space despite attempts to confine both their bodies and their minds, addressing systemic and individual attempts to reduce black human females to bodies made of muscle, bone, sexual organs. Most importantly, Martin teachers her readers how to read her work. Martin goes on to write, “To feel a presence, they say, can be like a haunting” (1). This line introduces an ambiguity that permeates her work. Whose haunting presence is Martin addressing? The living, breathing white human male? Perhaps. The question, who is haunting who, is couched in the lines, “What would we do without her? How would we know ourselves?” (1). Martin stares back from the male gaze with these questions.
The critic and poet, Sueyeun Juliette Lee accurately describes Martin’s work as, “challenging, evocative, necessary.” Most challenging is Dawn Lundy Martins ability to provoke her reader, to make them feel uncomfortable and yet strangely satisfied upon reading her poems. The use of parataxis in many of her poems builds a momentum that doesn’t let up. And the boxed form of many of the poems in the collection can give the reader an almost claustrophobic feeling at times. However, this claustrophobic feeling is paradoxically liberating for what it does not allow to be said. In one of her poems published on the Poetry Society of America website, she writes of “The hardness of silence, its tremendous matter, the nothing that is some thing, and of its coming.” This, I think, is what the occasional un-pretty repetition of the form did to and for me.
Her work is containment within containment created through the use of quotes, for example – “black”, “brown”, “blackness”, “poor” – and the brackets that contain phrases and sentences such as “[The body in the basement is bobbled with welts. It cries and cries in a wet corner. We must leave this in the well]” (14). Or, even more striking are the brackets that contain blacked out words or nothing at all. This effect is not one that seems to replicate a series of nested boxes but, rather, a tesseract. With language, Martin makes moves from representation to perception, turning into systemic repression, turning outward into resistance, turning vertically into history, turning horizontally into the present moment into erasure, into what needs to be written. These moves ultimately force what is not said to seep out of the edges.
Throughout the text, Martin’s incorporation of language from texts such as “The Degeneracy of the American Negro”; “The Negro Question”; and Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro are not called out explicitly, as she does with the work of Carrie Mae Weem. An intentional and self conscious calling attention to the way language is used in an attempt to disembody women of color –the way the humanity, dignity, sexual autonomy, safety is compromised, of course, by violent acts, but also by and through language, Particularly the written word. The texts she incorporates were written to indoctrinate, to weave an anthropological and historical narrative. But, beneath Martin’s pen, the racist, paternalistic language of these texts then is repurposed. She writes, “For thousands of/years there lies/behind the race one/dreary, unrelieved,/ monotonous chapter/of ignorance, nakedness,/superstition, savagery” (55). The speaker in the next line exclaims, “When we encounter the savage, we are in reverie” (55). She calls out the authors of these texts as well as the larger white “we” and turns their own language on them, pointing out their need for daydreaming and conjuring an other, again, in order to define themselves as “pristine.”
It is particularly poignant to me that words such as “white” and “whiteness” are absent. However, the words and their connotations loom around the poems. The white space pushing up against the neatly boxed poems make Martin’s resistance and empowerment all the more impactful.
February 28, 2022
Lundy Martin's book argues avidly for the human condition, and how white culture has framed non-white bodies to benefit a "universal" that would, by necessity, revolve around whiteness. What I admire most in Lundy Martin's poems is how she argues for this AND enacts what this would look like within language. In my mind, I've described it as Lundy Martin marginalizing the logocentric in language. For my reading, I felt that her previous book, Discipline, occupied a lyric and fluid approach to this critique, while a lot of Life in a Box is a Pretty Life is a bit harder to follow. It feels spiky to me, which definitely serves the more provocative events or statements in the poems.
June 4, 2023
Not that this isn't quality modern poetry, this style just isn't the most enjoyable for me. Although it was well done with common threads and themes throughout, the style throws me off because I can't make sense of most of it. The themes are also more serious, and several pages are the sort that I would hide in public. I would consider rereading this to understand it better.
July 23, 2018
The 2 stars reflects my personal taste; it wasn't "bad", it just wasn't a style I really got into.
July 28, 2016
How rare to finish a book of poetry on the same day it is started. How rare, then, to return to it immediately. This is something I wish to internalize and then spit out again (if possible); resolutely depressing, yet begging to be heard the world over.
I'm not making much sense, am I? I hope this is not making you-the-collective-of-potential-readers afraid, the box being more than references, and knowable to all. I think? (but at root, black, and queer, and most familiar to bodies deemed female.)
I wish I could do it more justice - & say things other than modern poetry really, really isn't so intimidating once the right collection is found. I wish someone hesistant out there will give this one a chance. But you kind of knew that already.
I'm not making much sense, am I? I hope this is not making you-the-collective-of-potential-readers afraid, the box being more than references, and knowable to all. I think? (but at root, black, and queer, and most familiar to bodies deemed female.)
To be in memory, destructive impulses,
a worship in the side room of the mind.
--
Survival skills liturgy:
Except, who was taken? We want to imagine our connections like sweet water.
Except, the possibility of complete missingness of the person. [...]
Sometimes, in spite of myself, the word, God.
A book is nothing, they say.
A want to theorize this phrase but then flesh just gone.
Tisa tells me about the coming dirt shortage. (p. 51)
I wish I could do it more justice - & say things other than modern poetry really, really isn't so intimidating once the right collection is found. I wish someone hesistant out there will give this one a chance. But you kind of knew that already.
February 23, 2016
"Indeed, we need something against which the pristine can manifest itself, can create its artifice of pristineness."
Want to read
March 8, 2019"What is the body but a leaking form? No room for leaking. A form so tight around my form it cannot seep or gesture. Complete enclosure."
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews