Book Release: Sighting Icarus, by Richard Martin

Sighting Icarus: Poems by Richard Martin

We’d like to announce our latest Igneus title: Sighting Icarus: Poems by Richard Martin.

This is book #3 in the White Quartet, a four book series of chapbooks designed by Martin and long time friend and collaborator, the late founder of Igneus Press, Peter Kidd. Martin dedicates this book In Memoriam to Peter Kidd, and we just wish our old publisher were still around to hold this beautiful book of words in the palm of his hands.

This title is available in our online Igneus Bookstore, along with the first two chapbooks in the White Quartet: Hard Labor and Cosmic Sandbox. #4, Hobo Return, will be out early 2021.

Sighting Icarus: Poems by Richard Martin
Sighting Icarus: Poems by Richard Martin

About the White Quartet series: Sighting Icarus is the latest and third in a four book chapbook series designed by the author and late Igneus Publisher, Peter Kidd. The first in the series, Hard Labor, came out in 2019, with Cosmic Sandboxreleased later that year. Richard Martin has dedicated Sighting Icarus “In Memoriam Peter Kidd,” a moving gesture in nod to decades of love and friendship. The final book in this series, Hobo Return, will be published with Igneus in early 2021. 

About the Author: In addition to the White Quartet series, Richard Martin has also published Strip Meditation (2009) with Igneus Press. Other Martin titles include: Ceremony of the Unknown (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020), Dream of Long Headdresses: Poems from a Thousand Hospitals (Signpost Press, 1988), White Man Appears on Southern California Beach (Bottom Fish Press, 1991); Modulations (Asylum Arts, 1998); Marks (Asylum Arts, 2002); boink! (Lavender Ink, 2005), Sideways (Obscure Publications, 2004),  Altercations in the Quiet Car (Lavender Ink /Fell Swoop, 2010), Under the Sky of No Complaint (Lavender Ink /Fell Swoop, 2013) Fungo Appetite (unarmed chapbooks, 2014), Buffoons in the Gene Pool (Lavender Ink /Fell Swoop, 2016), and Techniques in the Neighborhood of Sleep (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016). Martin is a past recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for Poetry, founder of The Big Horror Poetry Series (Binghamton, New York, 1983-1996) and a retired Boston Public Schools principal. He lives in Boston with his family.

Blast of reality

Photo taken with Focos
Photo taken with Focos

Bombshell rainy morning. Finally had the presence of mind to go through P.J. Laska’s missive rec’d last week. O my word. Edited mss of A Milky Way Accent, by the late Bob Snyder, published by the author two years before his death.

I brewed a cup of tea and read Old Martins New Strings by Mason Dixon Trio (Joseph Barrett, P.J. Laska, Bob Snyder, 1990, Soup Bean Press) from cover to cover. Experimental in presentation, substantive as presence.

I have a few copies, PM me if you’re interested. Or email Igneuspress@gmail.com.

Other Igneus titles by P.J. Laska can be ordered here, here, here, and here. Please support small independent poetry press. All of our proceeds go back into Igneus.

In OLD MARTINS, NEW STRINGS The Mason-Dixon Trio breaks with the unvarying solo form in which poetry is published. The result is a polyphonic composition in which three West Virginia poets bring their work together around a set of common themes: love, family, region, earth. Evident throughout is the “new tuning” of the Northern West Virginia (“Norbilly”) school – a baroque maximalist style that combines class and vulgarity, the comic and the sublime.

OLD MARTINS, NEW STRINGS is “more than memory,” “terra ridentium,” “the Secret Word a-leaping, an intriguing three way mirror of contemporary American reality.”

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