About Sharon Suzuki-Martinez
Sharon Suzuki-Martinez is a poet and essayist. Her first book, The Way of All Flux, won the MVP Prize. She also has a micro-chapbook, A Glimpse of Birds over O’odham Land. Suzuki-Martinez is a Kundiman fellow, a Pushcart nominee, and a Best of the Net finalist. She grew up in Kāne‛ohe, Hawai‛i, and now lives with her husband David Martínez in Tempe, Arizona, on the ancestral homeland of the Akimel O’odham.
Praise for The Loneliest Whale Blues
Lucky readers will find out the meaning of the word cherophobia in The Loneliest Whale Blues, will solve the mystery of Loch Ness, learn that someone works in a venom factory, meet the poet’s dream students, and visit a restaurant for monsters. Congenial, beguiling, page after page of this book unfolds “into one hundred birds of paradise.”
—RON KOERTGE, author of Yellow Moving Van and Vampire Planet
In this abundant, celebratory vision, humor and heart bind the pain of ancestral grief and American politics into an “eloquent revolution.” A vital balm and a swerving flashlight, these poems uncover reasons for wonder even in our complicated Anthropocene. Reading The Loneliest Whale Blues is a moving reminder: “hard-earned honey” is found in the hidden seams.
—KAREN RIGBY, author of Chinoiserie
“I got my wish in the dream world / and this melting world, too,” writes Sharon Suzuki-Martinez in her deeply perceptive new book, which resonates with honed lines and thinking. Moving from Hawai‛i, to Japan, to Arizona, her poems are both world-weary and enthralled by the world. She doesn’t juxtapose the beautiful and the monstrous—she constellates both into language that’s elegiac and ecstatic. Suzuki-Martinez has written a beautifully connective and consciousness-expanding book.
—EDUARDO CORRAL, author of Guillotine and Slow Lightning
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