Comments on: Splitting Open the World https://thepoetrybox.com/bookstore/splitting-open Sun, 31 Aug 2025 22:10:03 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.5 By: Jean Harkin https://thepoetrybox.com/bookstore/splitting-open#comment-89543 Fri, 18 Apr 2025 18:32:37 +0000 https://thepoetrybox.com/?post_type=product&p=12700#comment-89543 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.

]]> By: Jerrice J. Baptiste https://thepoetrybox.com/bookstore/splitting-open#comment-89269 Mon, 14 Apr 2025 23:37:20 +0000 https://thepoetrybox.com/?post_type=product&p=12700#comment-89269 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

]]>