Description
Inspiring and inventive, Woman Until Further Evidence is a winding catalog—an expansion—of gendered womanhood. This is a collection that bends time in on itself. At once future-oriented and archival, Rex Hawk-Martin’s use of form productively displaces the reader, confronting them with history and echoes. Whether the speaker is “considering top surgery at the end of the world,” researching true crime and archaeology, or simply falling in love, Hawk-Martin’s voice is deliberate and careful in everything it excavates: language, violence, queerness. These poems carefully balance fear and hope, reminding us just how extraordinary it is to be human.
—Saba Keramati, author of Self-Mythology
Like the vultures that populate these poems, Rex Martin-Hawk roots around in the culture’s death heap, hunting for life in the mythic, historic feminine slaughterhouse. “I vow / to dig until my hands sing, or until / the birds foretell a future without tombs,” they write. And while that future may not be ours to find, these poems gleam and pulse, like a bloody, beating heart, plucked by some queer magic from a corpse.
—Steph Cawley, author of No More Flowers and My Heart But Not My Heart
Rex Martin-Hawk writes with the eye of a forensic scientist and the heart of a poet, asking what it means to be human, queer, and alive in this world. “I’m trying to speak up before I’m dead,” they write, wrestling with gendered violence and longing in an effort to move beyond self-effacement. Threaded into this struggle is a crown of sonnets telling a story of “how to love each other in a country that doesn’t love us.” Queer desire is a means of survival in this book, as is personal excavation. This is a speaker who is constantly investigating–searching screens, tracing star patterns, and digging in the dirt for evidence of selfhood and bodily agency. Through lyrical meditations as well as innovative hybrid and visual forms, Martin-Hawk explores the hollows left by grief and finds music: “I am my own excavation. Dirt // covers my singing hands.”
—Rochelle Hurt, author of Lightboxes and The J Girls: A Reality Show
