Instructions for the Lovers

In A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes writes: “What I hide by my language, my body utters. I can deliberately mold my message, not my voice.” This tension between language as a malleable construct and physical expressions of it, in speech or writing, is at the center of Dawn Lundy Martin’s latest collection, Instructions for the Lovers.

The first few lines in the book, spread over several pages, comprise words formatted across one or two short lines and placed in the center of a blank page, with caesuras interrupting each utterance. It’s as if the speaker is trying to find the exact words, but they prove elusive:

                                    When we                         were when


water was not                         When we


                        subsumed
                        water

When             we                                                 shivered

                                    into

Despite the fragmented syntactical structure of these utterances, there are moments of connection throughout, which create unexpected continuities. Later in the book, words expand into fully fledged poems:

In the end, I suppose, defeat is inevitable,
            the closing of something once delicately propped
open, a silk curtain floated back to its nature,
            or a mother, which is what this is really about—fetish of
the mother, the fetish of her under my tongue, bleating
            about. Even I can’t let go, can’t sift her being (that part
of her that’s her) from my hands.

Martin’s poems have a philosophical quality to them, as they uncover what it means to live in a brown, queer body under exclusionary and oppressive systems:

America cannot distinguish certain urgencies from faith. Drones overhead dumping something into someones. How to enter belief? [A quest] [A dissident reaction] I have said “everyone” but I’ve meant, “a few.” I have said “chaos” but I meant “catastrophe.” The whole nature of loving another person.

The body is the anchor in this collection—its wants, needs, pain, lust. Language becomes a medium through which the speaker explores the relationship between desire, love, fear, grief, and the impermanence of the human condition: “We’re yearning for blood, for scar, any permanence.”