The first features one notices about David Tomas Martinez are his heavily tattooed arms and neck. Soon after he sits down at the trendy bistro where we meet, in Houston’s Montrose neighborhood, the server pauses to look and asks without hesitation, “Wow, how many tattoos do you have?” Martinez chuckles and replies, “Just four: two sleeves, one on my neck, and one on my back.” The server shakes her head incredulously but lets it go.

It’s easy to be skeptical of his answer: The sleeves of tattoos look so complex—with skulls, feathers, and flower imagery interlocking with text at different points—that one suspects there must be more. “The words are a record of my life,” he says. To illustrate, he taps his chest and the image of the sacred heart that can be seen there. Above that, on his neck, are the words Homme de lettres in ink.

“I got this one after I was accepted to the PhD program at the University of Houston,” he explains. “It’s a promise to myself. A statement to live up to.”

Indeed, at thirty-seven, Martinez is certainly on his way to making good on that commitment. This spring, this man of letters moves one semester closer to completing his doctorate, just as his first book of poetry, Hustle, is released this month by Sarabande Books. As an expression of gratitude, he tattooed his press’s logo on his right wrist.

He’s particularly pleased that Sarabande supported his idea for the cover: the title simply “tattooed” on a plain white surface. The script matches the lettering on his own body. (Martinez also sports a Hustle tattoo above his right knee.) “Bryan Romero, my tattoo artist, designed it,” Martinez explains. “He’s done all my tattoos. I’m monogamous that way.”

“Some people might think it’s weird,” he says, “but each time I get more work done, I think about what it took to get here. I’m making better choices and these tattoos are telling the story.”

***

Martinez’s story begins in San Diego (the name of the city is tattooed on his left shoulder), on the United States–Mexico border. As the son of a Mexican American father and a white mother, ethnic identity wasn’t something he considered seriously—since both sides of the family were racially mixed—until one day, in elementary school, when one of his teachers pointed out that he had checked off a box identifying himself as “White/Caucasian.” At home that night, his mother corrected him: He was to check the box that read “Hispanic.”

“I cried,” Martinez remembers. “I thought I would have to sell gum and candy like the children who pushed their merchandise to our car window as we waited in line to exit Mexico.” It wasn’t until reaching adolescence, however, when his relationship with his parents became strained, that he started looking for a place to belong. “My parents divorced when I was twelve,” he says. “If I wasn’t going to be part of a home I would be part of the street.”

The streets of southeast San Diego were overrun by young black and Latino gang members. It seemed an attractive option for an adolescent who wanted to be part of something like a community. Between the ages of fifteen and nineteen, while in high school, he was entrenched in a black gang on whose turf his paternal grandparents lived: “We were one of the few Mexican families in what was called Lil Afrika, so there was no question I was part of the hood.”

In those four years, he was caught up in street fights and drug deals. His relationship with his parents became strained even further, especially after Martinez’s girlfriend, who was fifteen at the time, became pregnant. Only sixteen himself, Martinez had few prospects, so for the next three years he lived with his girlfriend’s family, a Hawaiian Scottish household with problems very similar to the ones he had experienced at home. The following year, when Martinez was seventeen, his first child, David Anthony, was born. Martinez and his girlfriend decided not to marry; deep down they recognized that it wasn’t love that had brought them—or would keep them—together.

At the time, he had considered committing fully to the gang by tattooing its name, Lil Afrika Piru, in Old English lettering across his belly. But the birth of his son made him reconsider. He quit high school just one credit shy of receiving his diploma in order to work at a shipyard. Shortly thereafter, when he chose to enlist at the behest of his family, he had to return to school to complete that single credit.

“It seemed like I was finally aiming for some sort of stability, so I quit the gangs, finished school, and joined the navy,” he says. Though he signed up for six years, he quit after only ten months. That feeling of not belonging took hold of him again and though he didn’t know yet what he was looking for, he knew for sure he hadn’t found it in the navy. “I knew there was something bigger than myself out there, and I was determined to find it,” he says.

Choosing a new path, he joined the U.S. Department of Labor’s Job Corps program to earn a house-painting certificate, and then he enrolled in Southwestern College in Chula Vista, California, “mainly to play basketball.” During the three-year period it took him to complete an associate’s degree, his second son, Isiah, was born, an event that did little to strengthen his relationship with his sons’ mother. “I’ve got Anthony’s name tattooed on the inside of my left forearm and Isiah’s on the inside of my right forearm,” he says. He regrets that he couldn’t spare them the fate of the broken home he knew too well. Four years into the relationship, he parted ways with his girlfriend, who took sole custody of their sons.

“I didn’t want to lose anything else,” he says, “so I held on to a book.” He means this literally: He carried a dictionary with him wherever he went for two years. “I had to duct-tape the binding,” he says. “People on the bus thought I was carrying a bible. And in a way, it did save me, just like the Good Book.” The hunger for words gave him the courage to enroll in the BA program, and eventually the MFA program, at San Diego State University. Those words also proved useful as he experimented with writing sonnets and other forms.

Martinez is particularly proud of this period in his education. “I only wrote in metrics for two years, which sharpened my idea of line integrity and what could happen with language in a line,” he says. And although he has moved away from metrics since then, he affirms that meter is always in the back of his mind when he writes.

He credits teachers Glover Davis and Sandra Alcosser at SDSU with providing him with guidance and championing him to continue to write poems. “As soon as I got into the master’s program,” he recalls, “I decided to get this.” He holds up his forearms. He has Poetic tattooed on his right, License tattooed on his left. “When I go at something, I go at it hard.”

Writing poems, he discovered, was exactly that “something bigger” he was searching for. It engaged him on an intellectual and emotional level—awakening a part of his identity he had repressed while trying to live up to the tough-guy image in his old neighborhood, in his troubled relationship with the mother of his kids, and even in the navy. “I had been unhappy for so long, I didn’t realize I could be happy again,” he says. And indeed, there was plenty of satisfaction in struggling with writing a poem: The page was manageable, and yet it was expansive enough to contain the gravity and complexity of his life experiences.

During the time he was in college he met and eventually married a woman who shared a similarly complicated past, particularly with her parents. “We helped each other heal,” he says. The marriage lasted five and a half years before they divorced amicably, which made him feel he had achieved a maturity he had been lacking.

It took Martinez five years to complete his MFA, but he was fine with such a slow pace. It gave him time to write obsessively and read well into the night. “I still do,” he says. “I don’t get much sleep. Instead I read.” On those sleepless nights he devours poetry anthologies and tackles philosophy, particularly Nietzsche, because it reminds him of those times he tried to unpack his language as an unseasoned reader.

But before he made the move to Houston’s PhD program, he had one more important stop on his journey—Barrio Logan, across from San Diego’s famed Chicano Park. There Martinez lived for two years working as an adjunct at San Diego City College and at San Diego High School in the summers. “Culturally it was a rich experience,” he recalls, “but financially it was a disaster.” Though he finally found a community that nurtured his Chicano identity, he longed for the artistic space that stimulated his own creative instincts. Since they had been thriving in college, he decided to return to school and pursue a doctorate post-MFA.

At Houston, he met and was mentored by seasoned professionals like poet Tony Hoagland, who says he saw in Martinez’s work “a linguistic diversity, and the almost overconfident sense on the part of the writer that he could do anything that occurred to him inside the poems—that adds up to ambitiousness and potential.”

“David has a big, open, and honest heart,” Hoagland adds, “and his willingness to face, in his poetry, the griefs and brutalities and shames of manhood, and to explore and articulate those masculine secrets is like a sharp skewer that pierces through your heart now and then when you read the poems. Vulnerability is a talent too, you know.”

It was Hoagland who pushed Martinez to start thinking about publication as he entered his final year at Houston, and who believed Sarabande Books might be a good fit. Martinez submitted his manuscript and Sarah Gorham, editor in chief, took an immediate interest.

“I loved it after just one read-through,” Gorham recalls. “Martinez’s history is one of violence, machismo, dangerous sex, father hate, mother love, beat-up cars, drive-by shootings. And yet he has emerged with a poetry keen with emotional intelligence, wild with energy and grief, transcendent even while it rolls in the dust spotted with broken glass. No way is the book not going to make an impression.”

Martinez hopes that will be the case. “I’m excited about Hustle,” he says. “Like the tattoos on my body, this book encapsulates my transition from being a white child, to being a black-identified teenager, to being a Chicano and coming to an education about myself and the world that shaped me. Hustle is my attempt to define key aspects of my identity: masculinity, family, sexuality, and socioeconomic status, because everything’s a hustle—life, work, even poetry.”

Martinez understands the opportunities before him and he plans to take advantage of them, though he makes it a point not to conceal his checkered past. “If I can turn my life around, anyone can,” he declares. Second chances are indeed important to him—it’s why he returned to school, and why he married again. He and his wife Brittney are about to celebrate their second anniversary.

Martinez stands up to stretch and points out the tattoo parlor in a pink building across the street. “It’s why I eat here,” he says. “I like the view.” Though he considers himself a “California boy” to the bone, he’s grown fond of Houston and wouldn’t mind sticking around for another few years. But he understands the odds, particularly as he takes his chances on the competitive job market for teachers in the fall. Whatever place he calls home next, the only certainty at this point is that he’ll have a couple of new tattoos by then.

Rigoberto González is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.