Life in a Box is a Pretty Life

*Winner of the LAMBDA Literary Award for Best Lesbian Poetry, Finalist for the The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry from Publishing Triangle and The Firecracker Award for Independent Publishing in Poetry

Dawn Lundy Martin’s Life in a Box is a Pretty Life investigates the ways in which language claims absolute knowledge and draws a box around lived experience. Martin writes poems that seek out moments when the box buckles, or breaks, poems that suggest there is more. Life in a Box is a Pretty Life continues Martin’s investigation into what is produced in the interstices between the body, experience, and language, and how alternative narratives can yield some other knowledge about what it means to be black (or female, or queer) in contemporary America.