WHAT THEY’RE SAYING
NEW!
AVAILABLE TO ORDER
Praise for “Beyond Temples”
“A rich read, to be approached with the same wonder the poet approaches her world, reminding us all that, ‘You have to be very quick to catch that which is sacred and still alive.'”
~ Diana Rosen,
author of “High Stakes & Expectations“
“It’s as if Newberry is channeling these
lyric poems from beyond:
“We are not winning the war,
said the light.
We present Death with
countless bodies.”
~ Beth Copeland,
author of “Selfie with Cherry“
“Nothing gets illuminated by itself only.
A precious book, a necessary book.”
~ Seb Doubinsky,
author of “Mountains“
AVAILABLE NOW
“Glyphs”
“As we enter the pages of Martina Reisz Newberry’s fifth collection, Glyphs, the poems weave their way seamlessly, without section breaks, as poems amplify and echo one another. Newberry leans toward free verse poems that sing via ekphrasis, urbanity, and waves of wind and water.”
~ Mary Ellen Talley, author of Postcards from the Lilac City
“‘What pulses in us?’ asks poet Martina Reisz Newberry in her collection, Glyphs. With a sensibility reminiscent of Nobel Prize winner Wisława Szymborska, Newberry employs a deceptively conversational tone to wield resonant insights about the spirit of nature, faith, aging and mortality, and love.”
~ Terry Wolverton, author of Ruin Porn
“…Martina presents her elevation over this world in a way that resonates
with any artist’s filter…or to the common-person who hasn’t yet discovered their inner muse.
These poems shine a light for them, and all of us, into realms we are glad to have revealed.”
~ Rick Lupert, author of God Wrestler
“Whether shadowed by doubt or traced with a feminist sense of injustice,
whether wistful or exultant or humorous, however various the subject matter,
the poems of Glyphs have this in common: a sense of wonder at existence
and Martina Reisz Newberry’s generous and forgiving passion for life.”
~ Suzanne Lummis is the director of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival.
Her most recent book is Open 24 Hours.
BLUES FOR FRENCH ROAST WITH CHICORY
“BLUES FOR FRENCH ROAST WITH CHICORY”
is now available from Deerbrook Editions.com
“Blues for French Roast with Chicory, personifies Newberry’s outlook on life, an outlook ripened by years, smoothed and honed by reflection on life’s complexities, ironies and joys. Newberry’s work asks no easy questions, provides no clichéd answers. Hers is a poetics that resonates with, Oh, yes, I’ve lived that, I’ve felt that very thing happen in my life…this is Newberry’s world.
“Yet, she does not lecture, there is no need as the poems themselves do their job. And what, you may ask, is the poet’s job? Surely, our collective job is to provide shelters where our
readers may safely consider or reconsider their stance in life. Poets ask: What shall we do with the eye-blink of time allotted to each of us on this earth?”
~ Michael Escoubas
Poet, author of Monet in Poetry and Paint
“Here is longing for what was and what never was. Newberry uses juxtaposition freely to illuminate life’s dichotomies, and in doing so, reminds us that there are always opposites to consider and choices to make. And in the end, those choices define us, both inwardly and outwardly. Where some would object to this collection as being depressing, I found it to be an affirmation of life, of hard times survived, and still kicking. It explores what I believe are common reactions to common experiences…
“So what do I mean by all this? Only that these poems are worth a careful read, with heart, mind, and memory open to the pain that life deals us, and a ready recognition that none of us are alone in our struggles.”
~ Jim Lewis, Editor, Verse-Virtual
“Mmmmmm—nothing tastes and smells better than French coffee. The flavor of French roast with chicory tends to be strong and dark, yet mellow, with an almost undefinable aftertaste of enjoyable bitterness. The poems in Blues for French Roast with Chicory by Martina Reisz Newberry (Deerbrook Editions, 2020) (her sixth book of poetry) are similarly strong and dark, but mellow, with generous dollops of bitter truth. Blues for French Roast with Chicory is a 50-poem blues riff, a meditation, a wakeup call, and a satisfying mix of visionary poems about post-modern life—with all its complexities such as love affairs, friendships, old age, the impending Apocalypse, and more.
“Gentle readers, wake up and smell the (French roast with chicory) coffee! I highly recommend the bold mélange, Blues for French Roast with Chicory to anyone who loves this country and this planet. Martina Reisz Newberry is the real deal, a poet-visionary. When she speaks her truths—we all should listen.”
~ Eileen Murphy
Book Review Cultural Weekly
NEVER COMPLETELY AWAKE
“Never Completely Awake”
available from deerbrookeditions.com
“With “Never Completely Awake,” Martina Reisz Newberry gives us a substantial collection. In it she is glancing over her shoulder, rummaging through the dark in an attempt to come to terms with a vantage point that skirts the abyss. She peers over the edge, balances on the precipice.
“Never Completely Awake is both an accounting of time and an attempt to transcend it. Newberry addresses her lists, counts the worthwhile moments and aches in the rough spots to define meaning and beauty. In fact, this is where she begins, with what is beautiful – the cleanliness of bones in moonlight, the accident of passion – and the list goes on. Here the poet’s maternal sense cannot be denied. She wraps us in beauty before sending us out into the thick of it; the dark, the sensual, the uncertain and sometimes broken.
“Ultimately the reader will find that Newberry is a poet’s poet. She attends to words, structure and form with admirable diligence. She makes no apologies and goes about the work of articulating life with a certain sangfroid.
“These poems are terrestrial and Newberry is grounded among them yet a frenetic undercurrent cannot be ignored. However subtly, “Never Completely Awake” is attempting something monumental. Newberry knows that poetry is the elixir and she wants to live forever.”
~ Claudine Cain, Founder/Managing Editor Black Elephant Literary Review
“These poems are driven by a passion both sexual and scriptural through configurations of surrender to instinctive logic and imaginative opportunities. Nothing is lost upon her.”
~ Gerald Locklin (R.I.P.), Poetry Editor: Chiron Review, author of Poets and Pleasure Seekers
“Martina Reisz Newberry’s newest collection, Never Completely Awake, is nothing short of breathtaking. In poem after poem you find a generous spirit, a stunning acuity of image and vision, and, above all, her rare gift to wake us to a deeper circuitry…”
~ Robert Hedin, author, translator, editor
founder of Red Wing Center for the Arts, Red Wing Minnesota
“Transfixed by the hourglass, yearning for continuance the voices invoked by Newberry quest after ways to transcend, to keep going. Here, struggle and surrender dance their inseparable tango…”
~ Margot Farrington
Author of Scanning for Tigers
Reviews for WHERE IT GOES
To order Where it Goes : deerbrookeditions.com
I’m just plain bowled over by Martina Newberry’s poetry collection “Where It Goes.” These are poems I’ll read over and over again,
for the pure strength of their language and the surprises, light and dark, that they unroll.
~ Josephine Humphreys,
author of Rich In Love and Nowhere Else On Earth
This book rocked me, threw me off the chair in the little forest where I dwell. These poems made me cry, cheer, laugh, made chills run down my spine.
In her new poems, “Where it Goes,” Martina Reisz Newberry conjures the mythopoetic, the natural, conjures the contact zone of the body in nature, fully aware of itself and of nature’s powers. Meditative in the face of death and ruin. Starling and surreal, intoxicated with love and lust, in its images, and her characters, the book achieves a rare form history from the inside: real old desperate “hipsters,” suburbanites, the poet as a visionary and voiced persona narrating the adversity of living in the 21st century. There is a gentle but convincing gathering of the past that has created the sharp present in this book. So when she looks back, it is with passion and fury and wisdom: there are political poems here which dare to dissect the darkness in which we all walk, a darkness we’ve been acquainted with for a long time. Here and there, her poems are neat, sharp, beams of light, sunlight and soul-light. There is a hint of the Ginsberg, the Levertov and the Bukowski in the metaphysics she’s dealing with.
~ Albino Carrillo,
Author of In The City of Smoking Mirrors
Associate Professor of English, University of Dayton
Martina Newberry’s latest collection, WHERE IT GOES, meditates with profound compassion, revealing the delicate complexities of the human heart. With honesty, wit, imaginative breadth and prosodic grace, thorough poems like Those Who Pray, Prima Serata, and Incantation, Newberry explores the painful themes of death and life, youth and aging, prayer and spirituality, forcing us to examine our relationships both past and present.
Newberry’s words, through inherent lyrical sense and spiritual wisdom, evokea magical illumination of the ordinary, as shown in poems like Those Who Pray: “When Prospero’s bell rings, we walk / out and guess at why the afternoon is so old,/ gray instead of gold. It shuffles along, won’t let / us make out who comes there wading through the gray. / Sadness billows, sways in the twilight breeze like a / full skirt. Time to go home. “ In poems like On South Vermont, through an explorative curiosity of form andlanguage, the poet follows her own careful, at-times Roethke-like rhythm. In fact, the sentiment of this entire collection can almost be summed up in the lovely last lines of that poem: “A tourist told me, ‘This is a scary town.’ / I agreed. There was room for fear. / But it was the city, you see, and / there was room for everything. Even me.” With intense human vulnerability and wondrous irony, Newberry’s matter-of-fact, descriptive storytelling renders the poignant moments of life in an earnest tone that is both sensuous and nostalgic. WHERE IT GOES, altogether luminous and universal, relates us to one another, bringing us closer to a rich understanding of our world and ourselves.
~ Anne Tammel – author of fiction and poetry, Founder, Tammel Productions, leads Poets and Dreamers series of creative writing workshops
Where It Goes is a spectacular collection of poems. In a strong and nostalgic voice Martina Newberry writes about aging, death, old lovers, old friends, the old streets of Los Angeles, and poetry, “Poem comes from/ inside/the body/to heart/to mind/back to fingers/holding pen/” She asks the questions all of us must ask as we age: “I think/ long and often/ about what calls us/ What calls up to give up/ this for that?” Her words are hopeful, “Still, comes that moment: breeze blowing/the scent of Star Jasmine of the front porch./We stop dying for that moment, postpone/all that aggravates us.” She also writes, “I am delighted with my disasters” and so am I. And her words are dark, “so/ dark, it can’t be lit by a thousand/lamps.” I especially loved her descriptions of the old east side of Los Angeles, “The fierce city drew in its claws to pat my ass” “There was room for fear./But it was the city, you see, and/ there was room for everything. Even me.” These poems are dirges, laments, and anthems that take us from the first, Where It Goes, “Where does it go, all that living?” to the last, Where It Goes II, “My face, wet, pillowed,/ached with ignorance./Where did everything go?”
“Martina Reisz Newberry’s latest collection of poems, Learning by Rote, examines the shape of love, ageing, and coping with the left-handed curveballs that life sometimes throws at us in sixty well-crafted poems. The author is skilled in the use of poetic forms from ghazal to pantoum to tanka. The overall effect is one that makes the reader look deeper into those things we take for granted.”
One gets the sense from Martina Newberry’s poems of a poet that gets distinctive delight in the surprises of sudden and enlightening insight and discovery through the practice of verse. These poems study with unflinching curiosity the peculiar ways and thoughts of modern human society. The end result are well crafted poems that have a disarming emotional honesty that is simply refreshing.
.
Whether turning her attention to a mother’s precarious night kitchen, the courage in
the smoke from English Ovals, Irving Penn’s photograph of Parisian butchers, the 1957 coincidence of Hoffa’s election as Teamsters president and Russia’s launch of the world’s first artificial satellite into space, or the hurricane that arrives in the middle of an already weepy day, Martina Newberry makes unexpected music we’re better off for listening to…When it comes to love, war, friendship, and loss, Newberry’s double-edged blade of memory is never less than finely honed. She understands that—somewhere, everywhere, sooner or later—it’s a matter of physical, emotional, or psychic survival. In these poems you’ll find no small share of humane deliverance—one very human life at a time.
~ David Clewell (R.I.P.)
author of The Low End of Higher Things, Poet Laureate, St. Louis, MO.
Martina Newberry is a surprising poet. Just when you think you know what she knows, you don’t. She knows more and has the words to prove it. I found myself falling for her sense of things, appreciating not only that she has earned it but that she displays it with a nicely sharp edge.
~ Eloise Klein Healy,
author of The Islands Project: Poems For Sappho
Review for
RUNNING LIKE A WOMAN WITH HER HAIR ON FIRE
To order this book
Signed and Shipped $13.00
Whether playful or sad, boisterous or tender, Martina Newberry’s poems always feel like
affirmations–heartfelt, and hard-won. “It seems you have to keep loving/a thing so that it can live” she writes. That’s the aim of these exuberant poems, and the reader’s reward is to feel again the resilience of the spirit, and the saving grace of language.
~ Lawrence Raab, author of What We Don’t Know About Each Other, Winner of the National Book Award:
Martina Reisz Newberry 
6 thoughts on “Reviews”