Dionisio D. Martínez

Climbing Back

Chosen by Jorie Graham for the National Poetry Series.

In Climbing Back, his fourth collection of poetry and Jorie Graham's selection for the National Poetry Series, Dionisio D. Martínez leads us into a labyrinthine landscape of allusion and memory. His protagonist is the Prodigal Son (in his many avatars), whose return opens the book and whose travels are our own. Climbing Back is filled with historical and cultural signposts—the Warhol shooting, the race to the moon, Vietnam, DiMaggio, Sinatra, an imagined meeting between T. S. Eliot and Miles Davis, the movies of Cecil B. DeMille, the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893—but the familiar territory they delineate shifts into the surreal as we move from parable to myth. These prose poems eschew the linearity of narrative and instead work as a brilliantly baroque concoction of circles and mirrors and echoes, endlessly straining backward toward an idea of home. Climbing Back reads like a trail of clues that leads us, inevitably, to the unrecognizable place from where we thought we had started.

"This is a book of contingency plans. Also a book of interstellar (and intercultural) nightmares, a crashed party called civilization. . . . Heartbreaking, overstuffed, seeping with history, lonelier than imaginable and truly in-the-face of American culture, Climbing Back's debris-field of prose poems tries with all its heart to outrun cultural paradigms and ends up refining our spiritual ignorance till it's our most gorgeous attribute." —Jorie Graham, from her Citation for the National Poetry Series

"Merely to have portrayed the conundrums and paradoxes of modern life in prose poetry would have been challenge enough for any accomplished poet, but Martínez's deft guidance of the Prodigal Son through this psychic minefield into a final haven of peace and understanding marks his collection as one of the most important new works of poetry this year."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Martínez's collection of prose poems is . . . a journey through shifting dimensions of consciousness and experience that surprises with nearly every sentence. . . . By turns clever ("Light is the involuntary subtext when the topic is refraction"), witty (interpreters are "charged with numerous accounts of attempting to obstruct a literal translation"), and moving ("In exile, home is a story that breaks your fall from grace"), Climbing Back shimmers with imaginative energy and generous—if often oblique—insights. Martínez is a true original of formidable talents."—Fred Muratori, Library Journal, Best Poetry of 2000

"Climbing Back argues that reading isn't passive osmosis at all but, rather, a very real act of meaning making. . . . Martínez fills the poems with all sorts of debris from our culture: Miles Davis, the grassy knoll, Las Vegas and planned obsolescence as well as philosophy, religion, art, math and astronomy. And by having a "Prodigal Son" negotiate these details as one would sort out the nuances of metaphor or multiple perspectives, Martínez implies that actively examining our culture's debris lands us in exile as well-physically, perhaps, but emotionally, psychologically and intellectually as well."—Mike Chasar, The St. Petersburg Times

"Climbing Back is a collection of . . . emotionally charged prose poems by . . . one of our most consistently interesting mid-career poets. An engaging and satisfying work on a number of levels. . . . These poems, in fact, articulate a robust engagement with the inner and outer worlds, with science and culture, politics and pleasures of daily life. . . . They do what good poems have always done: engage imaginatively with the real world . . . expressing insights that carry a frisson of recognition that moves and charges us."—Michael Hettich, The Miami Herald

"Kind of an Everyman, yet very much his own man only, the Prodigal Son of Dionisio Martínez's book-length series dances and slinks, exults and sorrows, through prose poems of such jazzily beckoning density that they hold, in their compression, the passions we'd otherwise find in a loaded shelf-full of classic American novels." —Albert Goldbarth