Poetry by Camille Martin: Codes of Public Sleep

Website of Camille Martin

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From the back cover of Codes of Public Sleep:

in the private dream of a bricklayer, slumbering birds fly into shapeshifting clouds warbling madrigals that echo in the public sky. their antiphonies intertwine fusion and abyss, and the sympathetic vibrations of their shattered belief hum with the emptiness of synaptic codes and their insistently dazzling emergence. awakening, the bricklayer remembers tatters in the wind beneath a mackerel sky.

Codes of Public Sleep breaks open the code of private thought to modes of knowing catastrophe that defy insufficient isolating sagas. Camille Martin’s poetry is the shattering signal from a laudably wild tongue that will not keep still for our death-drive culture. This is a remarkable collection. –Carla Harryman

A sample from Codes of Public Sleep:

fabled hue

why a memory of birds flying into a cloud

keeps morphing outside all the history books,

pastel maps of successive conquerings

tiny rooms away. what birds remember

of shifting winds and hidden perches

with clear views. why a photograph makes

a story impossible in the increasing fog

of dna, while one’s heart keeps beating

a notion of species in the mind, pictures

of a grand theory of animal forever one

guess behind. could it be a momentary

lapse during a holiday on a mythological crater’s

rim, ripples of shadows in the cold concave sweet

in the abstract? if it were the slipperiness

of grammar in a box of solved puzzles,

connectives of mountain passes tempted

to be crossed. whether the passes look away

once shepherds reach grasslands.

For more about poetry, check out my blog:

Rogue Embryo: Camille Martin's blog about poetry, collage, photography, whatnot