Deerbrook Editions

Review in Drunkmonkeys
Reviews of Martina's books
Learning by Rote page

Review of Where it Goes by Albino Carillo

This book rocked me, threw me off the chair in the little forest where I dwell. These poems made me cry, cheer, laugh, made chills run down my spine.

In her new poems, “Where it Goes,” Martina Reisz Newberry conjures the mythopoetic, the natural, conjures the contact zone of the body in nature, fully aware of itself and of nature’s powers. Her poems are sometimes harsh and honest about the self in relation to others, and the lived life: human, to be sure, meditative in the face of death and ruin.

Starling and surreal, intoxicated with love and lust in its images and her characters, the book achieves a rare form of history from the inside: real old desperate “hipsters,” suburbanites, the poet as a visionary and voiced persona narrating the adversity of living in the 21st century. There is a gentle but convincing gathering of the past that has created the sharp present in this book. So, when she looks back, it is with passion and fury and wisdom. There are political poems here which dare to dissect the darkness in which we all walk, a darkness we’ve been acquainted with for a long time.

Here and there, her poems are neat, sharp, beams of light, sunlight and soul-light. There is a hint of the Ginsberg, the Levertov and the Bukowski in the metaphysics she’s dealing with. She reaches amazing levels of passion, her words are even and precise and put together organically, creating startling and beautiful vistas of life—and by this I don’t mean she hews to the golden mean—she makes poems organically, she speaks her visions and meditations in the projective, in the space between bodies, in the space between the city, nature, and herself.

As a poet Reisz Newberry crafts lines of hot, personal intensities:

“Hold me hard and close
while I fight for our passion
and fight our way out of slavery.”

“God pisses ice. I know he’s there—someone’s there—
doing some insider trading or
checking out the Fall collection
from Abercrombie and Fitch.” (Prima Serata)

Beyond the realm of confession, and into the heart of the desert, her poems tell us

“The wind
is so strong sometimes, it pulls
needles from the cacti and
sends them straight through our hearts. “ (Redhead—Three About Sadie And Me)

This is exactly what her book accomplishes in great, dazzling poems of
emotional, mythic and poetic intensity

Dear reader, in this book you will find so many poems worth reading over and over
again, as I did. Truly the work of a master poet.

Albino Carrillo
Author of In The City of Smoking Mirrors
Associate Professor of English, University of Dayton, Dayton, Ohio

Martina is also the author of Learning By Rote (Deerbrook Editions 2012), 100 Select Poems plus One, What We Can’t Forgive, Late Night Radio, Perhaps You Could Breathe For Me, Hunger, After the Earthquake: poems 1996-2006, Not Untrue and Not Unkind and Running Like A Woman With Her Hair On Fire: Collected Poems (all available from amazon.com and most online booksellers).

Winner of i.e. magazine’s Editor’s Choice Poetry Chapbook Prize for 1998: An Apparent, Approachable Light.

The author of Lima Beans and City Chicken: Memoirs of the Open Hearth—a memoir of my father—published by E.P. Dutton and Co. in 1989.

Martina has written four novels and several books of poetry, has been included in Ascent Aspirations first hard-copy Anthology and three others in the Ascent Aspirations Anthology library, also in the anthologies In The Company Of Women, Hot Summer Nights, Blessed Are These Hands, and have been widely published in literary magazines such as: Ascent Aspirations, Bellingham Review, Cape Rock, Connecticut Poetry Review, Cenacle, Commonline Journal, Counterpunch, Current Accounts, Divine Femme, Haight Ashbury, Iota, Istanbul Literary Review,Niche, Piedmont Literary Review, Southern Review of Poetry, Shot of Ink, Smiling Politely, Touchstone, Trivia, Women’s Work, Yet Another Small Magazine, and many others in the U.S. and abroad.

Other notes of achievement:
Residency at Yaddo Artists Residency 1987, New York
Pushcart Prize for Poetry Nomination by Andrew Hudgins, 1988
Residency at Djerassi Artists Retreat 1989, CA
Residency at Anderson Center at Tower View Artists Retreat 1992, Red Wing, Minnesota
Astra Press, Editor’s Choice Chapbook Prize, 1998, Editor: Yolanda Gottlieb

Lives in her beloved city, Hollywood, CA with her husband, a media artist, and their feline Charles T. Cat.