The Perugia Press Prize is a national poetry award for first or second books by women. Begin Empty-Handed was chosen from more than five hundred submissions.
The poems in Begin Empty-Handed ride the hinge between the life expected and the reality of life in process. In response, the mid-life speaker pivots between empathy and disengagement, resulting in paradox and believability. While she surrenders to hard truths—loss of parent, enduring marriage, daughters in trouble, for example—she changes the subject, she digresses, then she looks straight at the pain. Throughout, she remains remarkably witty and ironic. No illness, damage, or danger is made light of; painful situations are witnessed or resisted with a raw, honest, and intermittently comic attitude as the poet goes about the brutal work of letting go.
Martin is currently a therapist in private practice in Kalamazoo. Her first book is titled The Hourglass Heart.
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Perugia Press— Begin Empty-Handed, Gail Martin