Poet Joshua Martin’s prolific body of work signals a conductive mass in expressive thought – at one and all-in on chaos. punctuated avalanche envelops language, symbol, punctuation, score, and sound – ricocheting its “drizzle / sizzle /about AN / oMeN” in an “OBLIVION / fade aWaY.” With a polyrhythmic outward trajectory, Martin seeks, in the best sense, with energetic trajectory, in the pocket, and of our provocative avant-traditions. The wisest poets know to forgo easy virtue of ‘meaning’ (whatever that is), instead demonstrating vast interrelationships of our expanding universe – negative, capable, able to hold mess and message with a co-creating wonder: “matter / munch / meant / OWNER=ship/ IN tandem.” This book arrives at a dangerous moment, an occasion requiring careful attention and rescue from a “complete malfunctioning system , , repressed / GLOBES”. Dear reader: Wake up the big dog, bring this good-time mountain tonic, and prepare to dig.

– Andrew K. Peterson

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Take another journey into dense abstraction with punctuated avalanche a language conniption where meaning is pulverized and space, texture and sound are given full reign. A great work of that new non-objective writing. Like the elephant you cannot see, startling and beautiful.

-Nathan Anderson

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Not to mince words more than would “generic cannibals chirping,” each page/poem a punch-card from that photoelectric football board game with overlapping plays, a light board with sliding cards that block the light “spreading the longitude” according to what plays Punctuated Avalanche runs.

Stump speeches at whistle stops, “thrilled equals retch book.” Each page a whole chapter, or short story, or shooting script or letter home, an “escapade” or “bound haystack.” Rules they are a-changing – now “dandruff’s yummy,” not to mention the “pencils [are] misbehaving.” 

What better “prodigy” than a “nude” one as what is more prodigious in many senses than bare flesh? “Warble fizz scheming saucer wince sheet music melodics empirical reportage engaged puppet scenario.” Q: Script or score? A: “Maximum score.”

Instead of death by 1000 plot cuts and narrative thumbscrew torture devices, we have “cleaner than average tone tongue torch trip,” a ticket to ride Ann-Margret in beans and champagne, death-rolling with life-sized hot dog that hers and reader’s “saliva whispers thereupon.”

“Saliva whispers and flop-flop” is to sit simultaneously with a Robert Wyatt nursery rhyme while our “sandstorm membership” has us reading world histories and movie treatments where “waning cul-de-sac vibrations” are “geographic framing devices…[a] ZETANGLE…[a] stingray theory [of] Illegal reputation [and] infinite regressions.”

-John Crouse

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$10