Good Stock Strange Blood

Bold, formally innovative prose poems that challenge our ideas of race, voice, bodies, and justice.

“And, yet, each morning a fireheart grief in the body coming out of sleep. The listening to the smoke as if fills and weeps inside the chest, choking strength out hands weighted, dangling. We wonder where else it lives before it fills the body up. We assume it comes inside through the hole that promises invasion.”

Publication date: August 1, 2017

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 144 pages

ISBN: 9781566894715

Dawn Lundy Martin is the author of A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (University of Georgia Press, 2007), Discipline(Nightboat Books, 2011), and Life in a Box is a Pretty Life(Nightboat Books, 2015). Martin is also a cofounder of the Black Took Collective and a member of the HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? global arts collective. She is associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

Winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award

Finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry

“Martin uses a whiplash of short, punched-at-us phrases that offer a powerful sense of African American history and the struggle to define oneself for oneself, not as others would.” 

—Library Journal

“Martin charts new possibilities for subverting those (white) structures of domination and control that would reduce black subjectivity to a mute and endless re-inscription of its traumatized collective past.”

—Poetry Northwest

“I read Good Stock Strange Blood and then I read it again immediately because I needed to relive the relentless and beautiful pressure placed on every word, every page, every silence.” 

—Daniel Borzutzky

“We need this resilience, this bloody reckoning, this wit and nuance, now.” 

—Maggie Nelson

“Martin’s tender and defiant gesture in these unshakable poems is to open and open, relentlessly, into rage and desire, into blackness and ‘blackness’, into an AfroFuture where ‘existence inside of both loss and abundance’ might no longer feel impossible.'” 

—Anna Moschovakis

“A subtle and intriguing meditation, original in form, experimental in theme, and curious and probing in content.”

—NewPages

“Dawn Lundy Martin’s poetry is eviscerated and eviscerating. In Good Stock Strange Blood, she languages violence and the varied textures and hues of systemic racism and intergenerational trauma while creating a new state of being, simultaneously cauterized and free.”

—Full Stop