Running Like a Woman with Her Hair on Fire

by Martina Newberry

Martina Newberry's Running Like A Woman With Her Hair on Fire explores the coincident power and vulnerability of the human relationship to its surroundings. Here are poems about nurturing and mourning, lovers, children, friends, relatives--the significant minutiae that forms the ordinary world. Those who people these poems are real; they remember, expect, love, hate, cry, laugh, lose, and sometimes win. Not champions--not outlaws--they relentlessly pursue meaning and reality against the background of a world that often betrays them. These are stories of common experience. There is humor, impertinence, irony, passion and assurance that comes from a well-forged identity and the firm belief that what should happen, will happen. Consistent in tone, precise in language, Martina Newberry's voice introduces private and public thoughts and conversations about things that matter. Without whining, without belligerence, this poetry lives with us rather than outside of us, celebrates our willingness to move on and keep moving on regardless of ease, tragedy or victory.

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Martina Reisz Newberry’s most recent book, HUNGER, is now available for purchase at amazon.com and at most online bookstores.

Newberry is also the author of AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE: POEMS 1996-2006. NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND, and RUNNING LIKE A WOMAN WITH HER HAIR ON FIRE: Collected Poems.

Martina Newberry's work is daring, complex, and, at the same time, accessible. Newberry’s voice haunts us with her (and our) perplexity in living in a world that strives for goodness, but is slaked by miscommunication, lies and war. Her work is an achievement in skill, perception, and spirit.