Martine Bellen

Wabac Machine Martine Bellen

Poetry. Quirky, electric poems, spare and challenging.--Peter Matthiessen

WABAC MACHINE begins innocently enough with the thought that a cat has no real name and proceeds through inexorable dream/dervish/fairy tale logic to a place (the wild?) where nouns dissolve. This is a world of radical flux where self is barely even a construction. Let's call it post-human. There is nothing academic about it. Things loom up and are always something else. Here it makes perfect sense for one 'me' to say, 'I sell temporary kitties in the form of reconstituted sponges.'--Rae Armantrout

Martine Bellen invokes a new Muse, a new daughter of Mnemosyne, in WABAC MACHINE. In these poems, Time itself is the traveler-visiting epic, visiting nightmare, mischief and the Land of Heart's Desire. To Bellen, Time is a creature alive for an instant, and the instant reaches very far indeed, in every direction, even so far as the laughter of the gods.--Donald Revell

Martine Bellen's psychological and linguistic adventures in poetry are unlike anyone else's. Celebrating the instabilities of our experience, her poems maneuver kaleidoscopically between ordinary life and myth or fairy tale, vital human concerns such as identity and dreamlike atmospheres where nothing stays as it appears for long. Her 'host of unlikely divinities' display a reality that is never ordinary, always evocative.--Charles North