Description
Splitting Open the World
by Carolyn Martin
Carolyn Martin’s sixth poetry collection, Splitting Open the World, borrows its title from Muriel Rukeyser’s question, What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open. Recognizing that in this wobbly universe, truths strain, turn, twist/to revise themselves, Martin explores a world split open in poems about family and friends, about life as an English teacher and Roman Catholic nun, and about the inspiration lurking in the everyday. Both accessible and musical, wise and witty, her poems affirm the power of poetry to evoke emotion, provoke thought, and connect readers more deeply to the world and to themselves.
Enjoy a video of Carolyn reading from her new book:
Early Praise:
How do we become who we are? In order to find out, Carolyn Martin interrogates her past (“the girl / who can’t keep words in her mouth”) and follows its path to her present. Along the way, she uncovers truths, never turning away from her own flaws. At the center of her investigation is her long-lived mother, who “mapped / her way around constraint, found its edge, and flew.” Part memoir, part elegy, Splitting Open the World is another rich and welcome collection by a stellar poet.
—Andrea Hollander, author of And Now, Nowhere But Here
“Poetry is just the evidence of life,” said Leonard Cohen. “If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.” Carolyn Martin’s Splitting Open the World is a bonfire of illuminated reckoning, reconciliation, and redemption. As this buoyant speaker transmutes the agonies of witness to the grace of wisdom, the reader is also transformed. We are “Free to stand / outside [ourselves] and revel in ecstasy” with her as loss, grief, and shame are eclipsed by wonder and possibility. This collection splits open our world, then makes it whole again in a feast of astonishment.
—Sage Cohen, author of Writing the Life Poetic
In the epigraph to Carolyn Martin’s Splitting Open the World, Muriel Rukeyser asks, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” In this spectacular collection, Martin admits that “in this wobbly universe, truths strain, turn, twist to revise themselves” as she wrangles with the truths about her relationship with her mother, her various loves, and her careers as a nun, teacher, and business woman.
She demonstrates her deep empathy for all lives around her––from her six-year-old Ethiopian neighbor to a homeless woman on a highway ramp to a tiger at the San Diego Safari Park. In one stunning image after another, she flings her generosity wide to include all life on earth affected by climate change where “Every living thing is scrambling to memorize seasons that won’t stand still.” Everyone who enters these pages will delight in these poems and become better people in the process.
—Colette Tennant, Ph.D., author of Sweet Gothic
About the Author
From Roman Catholic Sister of Mercy and English teacher in New Jersey to international management trainer; from author of business books to poetry collections; from work addict to devotee of the Spanish proverb, “It is beautiful to do nothing and rest afterwards,” Carolyn Martin is blissfully retired––and resting––in Clackamas, Oregon.
A lover of gardening and snorkeling, feral cats and backyard birds, Martin embraces poetry as her way of interacting with the world––in images, rhythms, sounds, and intensities of language. That is why she’s settled into the joyful task of translating experience into as few words as possible.
Her aesthetic is found in Galway Kinnell’s statement, “To me, poetry is somebody standing up…and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.” With little concealment, her poems grapple with this challenge.
Martin’s poems have appeared in more than 200 publications throughout North America, Australia, and the UK. The Poetry Box released her second collection, The Way a Woman Knows, in 2015; a chapbook, Nothing More to Lose, in 2020; and her fifth collection, The Catalog of Small Contentments, in 2021.
For more see: www.carolynmartinpoet.com.
Jerrice J. Baptiste –
Carolyn Martin uses her unapologetic truthful language to express her life. Splitting Open the World is full of poems in memorable forms, rich metaphors, and titles that invite me to enter because of their directness and rawness. I become her curious six-year-old Ethiopian Neighbor who unexpectedly transforms the meaning of the word overwhelmed in her own innocent joyous way. I’m the fifty-year-old who wants to know where Carolyn’s courage comes from to challenge her loveless relationship with her mother in the poem Burying Our Mother’s Ashes. Each poem lingers and leaves me with the soul of each character wide open. I forget that I’m reading poetry until the end. And I ask myself again and again, did she really say that?
~Jerrice J. Baptiste, author of Coral in The Diaspora
Jean Harkin –
Carolyn Martin reveals so much of herself and her back story in this stellar collection of poetry. Moments of her life, memories, and meaningful insights are shared with the reader, and I feel I know Carolyn better. The complexity of human emotions is seen in her insightful and artful poetic lines: disappointment and relief, love and resentment, grief and hope. I will go back to these pages again, as I feel there is even more to be gleaned.