Dionisio D. Martinez Selected Works

In this exuberant and distinctive collection, Dionisio Martínez addresses topics as diverse as love, the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, twentieth-century art and music, and the relevance of language in an age of image. Much of Martínez's private iconography comes from the picket-fence California community of his youth, in which large events—from the veneration of pop icons (Jean Harlow, Ed Sullivan) to the Vietnam War—seemed to move in slow motion. As an adult, the poet tries to make sense of what the child could not grasp.

"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." —from Jorie Graham's citation for the National Poetry Series

"Dionisio D. Martínez's Climbing Back is an epic-poetic-cinematic response to culture, a one-book shorthand to the 20th century and beyond, a series of responses to the world that are imaginative rather than reductive." —Susan Hussey, Organica

Winner, State Street Press Chapbook Competition.

Winner, Ohio State University Press / The Journal Award. Explores the intersection of cultural identity, offering a self-portrait of a man caught between the various cultures of which he is a part.