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.

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Poems by Carolyn Martin

Carolyn Martin, in her second collection of poetry, is not afraid to ask the difficult questions and tackles them with her intelligent wit, wrapping them individually in her quilt of compassion.

About the Author

From Roman Catholic nun and Associate Professor of English to management trainer and business writer, Carolyn Martin’s life has taken her from coast to coast, from the classroom to the conference stage, from poetry to business writing and back again. After retiring from the business world in 2008, she returned to her first love–poetry. Her poems have appeared in a variety of journals. Carolyn currently lives in Clackamas, Oregon, where she gardens, writes, and plays with creative colleagues.

What They’re Saying…

I love the intimacy, feistiness, smarts, and charm of Carolyn Martin’s second collection of poetry. She is a poet deeply invested in everyday holiness, in “cobwebs sighing on a wall” and “glory pouring over earth.” In love with mysteries brought down to earth, Martin knows what contemporary oracles are for; her often visionary gaze lets us see “what’s useful to know/when nothing’s just itself.” She handles the most difficult subjects – death, gender identity, love, families, war, and belief – with great compassion and clarity.

– Kathleen Halme,
Author of My Multiverse,
Winner, 2014 Green Rose Prize

The Way a Woman Knows traverses the profane and the quotidian, as in “… slick with rabbit-splat the Kia/smeared in puddling rain …” and soars into the realm of the goddess and myth, revealed in the poem “Dancing with the Women in the Moon.” With a fresh eye, Carolyn Martin re-envisions old tales like Antigone and Ismene, David and Goliath. And in her masterful, heart-wrenching persona poem “What’s Left to Burn,” this former nun dares to tell the truth about family and loss.

– Willa Schneberg,
Author of Rending the Garment,
Recipient, 2002 Oregon Book Award in Poetry

Throughout Carolyn Martin’s vibrant new poetry collection, The Way a Woman Knows, we hear a rare voice, a voice of honesty and clarity. Not afraid to ask questions of love, history, memory, or God, Martin’s poems search out the difficult, vital answers. “But what’s true?” one poem inquires, as another asks the world, “What happened after that? … / And then what happened after that?” This is a book that gracefully opens its hands to the answers, both painful and humorous alike. Whether “releasing secrets / into dusk like enlightened fireflies” or asking directly to be surprised by God, Martin’s powerful poems tell us that we can live like this – in poetry, in love, in truth.

– Annie Lighthart,
Author of Iron String, Airlie Press, 2013

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