Poets & Writers
Published on Poets & Writers (https://www.pw.org)

Home > Dana Henry Martin

Dana Henry Martin [1]

Listed as: 
Poet
Public address: 
Toquerville, UT
Utah US
Email: 
danahenrymartin@gmail.com
Bio: 

Dana Henry Martin (she, they, any) is a poet, medical writer, and health- and mental-health advocate whose work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, Chiron Review, Cider Press Review, Fence, FRiGG, Mad in America, Meat for Tea, Muzzle, New Letters, Stirring, ONE ART, SWWIM, Willow Springs, and other journals under the names Dana Henry Martin, Dana Guthrie Martin, and M Ross Henry. Their essay Impossible Histories: Voicing Traumas in Poetry was published by Flapper Press earlier this year. Their chapbooks include No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press, forthcoming), Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books), In the Space Where I Was (Hyacinth Girl Press), and The Spare Room (Blood Pudding Press). Their full-length collection, Crude, about growing up in Oklahoma, is in progress. Martin weaves, birds, and hangs out with the cows who live next to the cemetery in Toquerville, Utah. Below is a sample poem that first appeared in MadHat Annual.

—

Fawns Discovered Inside a Dead Doe

You lived inside your mother’s womb, its water
and salt. You were two, twins. Each a mirror
for and of the other. One of you laid with hooves
tucked beneath your torso, your neck arched
so your head could rest next to your own body.
The other laid along the first, a drape,
not an inch of space parting this fur from that,
this muscle from that, this bone from that.
Eight ankles, eight legs, four ears, four eyes—
everything lovely about a deer, doubled.
The taxidermist who rolled your mother over
that evening by the highway was not the man
who struck her but the one who arrived after
and tried to help. He found you too late,
fully formed but drowned before you lived.
He gathered you in a blanket, brought you home
and preserved the uterine form of your bodies—
the way you nestled one another through death,
thin skins pulled like tarps over spines and hips,
your two faces facing each other, your mouths
that nearly touch but don’t. Now, in your vitrine,
you pass breathless secrets back and forth without
end. Secret of death. Secret of suffering. Secret
of two slipping in and out of this dark world as one.

 

Favorite authors: 
Michelle Boisseau, Kelly Boyker, Allen Braden, Charles Bukowski, Inger Christensen, Cynthia Cruz, Joyce Ellen Davis, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, T.S. Eliot, Jack Gilbert, Allen Ginsberg, Samuel Green, Linda Gregg Terrance Hayes, Christopher Howell, Andrew Hudgins, Paul Hunter, Issa, Ronald Johnson, Janice King, Carolyn Kizer, Melissa Kwasny, Li-Young Lee, Audre Lorde, Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo Neruda, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Kathleen Norris, Alice Notley, Frank O’Hara, Sharon Olds, Robert Pinsky, Adrienne Rich, Tammy Robacker, Anne Sexton, Richard Siken, Charles Simic, Ruth Stone, Stephan Torre, Ocean Vuong, Charles Wright, Greta Wrolstad, Teri Zipf
Twitter/X: 
@danahenrymartin
Born in: 
Norman, OK
Oklahoma
Website: 
https://noseahere.com [2]

Source URL:https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/dana_henry_martin

Links
[1] https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/dana_henry_martin [2] https://noseahere.com