Bad Alchemy: Poems - Softcover

"The voice is contemporary, level-headed, confiding, but it quite often deals in marvels and apocalypse ... with that sort of verve diligent souls seem able to spark off from the infinite resources of language... The best new American poet I've read in some time." -- William Scammell "Americans do not have the refracting lens through which to see themselves, but Martinez has uncovered their basic optimism, their heartfelt skepticism. He is blessed, and cursed, with senses of both intimacy and distance. The movement of his poetry is almost compulsive, worrying at the edge of association as it strives for explanation, melding concepts that might otherwise remain discrete. This is not surrealism, but a third landscape, an emotional territory carved out of the imagination." -- Judith Kitchen "Mr. Martinez has made the necessary accommodations with political reality, yet, for him, the dreadful fact of alienation continues to inform all other truth: 'No matter where I go,' he observes, 'I carry foreign currency.'" -- William Ferguson "[Bad Alchemy is] pulled together by lines that zoom across the page, phrasing that grabs you almost more quickly than you can read it, and references so sly they're worth a second-and sometimes a third and a fourth-glance. Martinez delicately balances exuberance and poignancy, and many of his prose poems should be cautionarily prefaced, 'Please fasten your seat belt.'" -- Elizabeth Gunderson "Always inventive, Martinez is the master of the memorable line: 'In a history of closed doors, an open / window means everything.' Recommended for all larger collections." -- Daniel L. Guillory "[Bad Alchemy] sweeps the reader along on a wave of dazzling imagery and verbal magic... This is an original voice, a fusion of American energy and Latin American mysticism, Whitman filtered through Marquez and Paz." -- Peter Meinke "Martinez's poems reflect poignantly on the poet's status as a Cuban exile destined to a perennial sense of dislocation." -- David Lehman

In this exuberant and distinctive collection, Dionisio Martinez 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 Martinez'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.