In Nighthawks, Lisa Martin traces a creaturely interconnectedness, traversing land, ecology, and other boundaries amid crises unfolding at a global scale. These poems parse aspects of human embodiment—emotion, relationship, mortality—and reflect on how to live through moments of intense personal and political upheaval. Long verses about the remnants of marriage and divorce, and a sonnet cycle about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, sit alongside lyrical explorations of midlife loneliness, mothering, and grief. Philosophical ruminations on form and language are also present, asking what good is a poem, a verse, in a world so full of things one might hold an aversion to? “What if I write a line, follow it in, what if / the line tears what I didn’t mean to open?” Martin’s experimental collection engages in exquisite emotional truth-telling, asking how we can hold and tend the world with more attunement and care.

​ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lisa Martin is an award-winning poet and essayist. She is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, One Crow Sorrow and Believing is Not the Same as Being Saved, and a co-editor of How to Expect What You’re Not Expecting: Stories of Pregnancy, Parenthood, and Loss. Her work has received the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry, The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award for Poetry, an Independent Publishers (IPPY) award, and a National Magazine Award for Personal Journalism. She was a finalist for the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize in 2018. Her most recent works are Creative Writing in Post-Secondary Education: Practice, Pedagogy, and Research, a blend of memoir and scholarly review, and A Story Can Be Told About Pain, her first novel. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at MacEwan University in Edmonton, on Treaty 6 territory.