“Becoming Weather isn’t poetry as post-structuralist paraphrase, it’s a book about being-in-the-middle: of courtship, a New York commute, global crisis, phenomena and the moments of attention they attract. . . . Martin is ingenious at producing solution after solution for making the line a place of becoming rather than the static origin or fate of assertion.”
—Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Lana Turner
“Martin’s vocation is to voice the inspired moments of his existence, to sing the correspondence between instance and infinity, between spots of time and high virtues, between epiphanies close at hand and the void beyond what is not at hand.”
—Sugar House Review
“Becoming Weather sweeps up the reader into the tumultuous, mind versus body, world of the speaker.”
—NewPages
“Put simply, [Martin] speaks from the edge in a voice you understand.”
—Denver Examiner
“The precision of Martin’s guidance—its wise thrill, if you like . . . is in fact careful curation from an active imagination in which syntax stays a half step ahead of sense.”
—Kenyon Review
“Encountering Martin’s buoyant, casually cerebral work feels a bit like entering a party he is hosting. . . . like Frank O’Hara, the magnanimous sense of self in Martin’s poems is richest when refracted through encounters with friends, lovers, and random passersby.”
—Boston Review
“[Chris Martin] feels his way toward a sense of existence that embraces but is not confined to the intellect. The honesty and rigor of this pilgrimage leads Martin to an almost euphoric state.”
—Bob Hicok
“Punctured as he is, Martin never loses the whole for the part as he deftly stitches his bright song through the gaps.”
—Eleni Sikelianos
“Chris Martin is working with deftness in that rich terrain where a totalizing instability is met by the musical surety necessary to begin breaking it down.”
—Anselm Berrigan
