Instructions for the Lovers – Dawn Lundy Martin

[Nightboat Books, 2024]

“What is the opposite of devastation?” Martin asks near the beginning of Instructions for the Lovers. In reply to her own question, the poet offers not certainty but potential: “Fruit?”

The growth of fruit can transform a shell-shocked landscape. But that doesn’t mean that fruit prefers its conditions harsh, or that the person who picks the fruit, licking clear juice where it drips down her wrist, need appreciate its sweetness solely as the sweetness of survival. Fruit’s genius, after all, is in the strategies it finds to seed its own future. Its self-invention is delicious. The eater closes her eyes and takes another bite.

When poetic vision is as precisely realized as it is in Dawn Lundy Martin’s Instructions for the Lovers, a critic, in laying out her interpretation, risks mystifying that which is implicitly understood. Martin’s poems should be reckoned with bodily; they should be imbibed. “Records desist,” Martin writes, as if batting away the bureaucratic flutterings of written language and its drive to regulate and classify knowledge: “Anyone can be the ur-unwitness.” In Instructions for the Lovers, Martin proceeds to remake the epistemology of poetics, in a taut eighty-two pages.

Instructions for the Lovers is Martin’s fifth book of poetry. Each of her previous collections has received a significant literary award, most recently the 2019 Kingsley Tufts award for Good Stock Strange Blood (Coffee House) and the 2016 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry for Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life (Nightboat). In her introduction to the anthology Letters from the Future: Black WOMEN / Radical WRITING (Kore, 2018), which she coedited with Erica Hunt, Martin comments:

To look into the future is to imagine and create another world. Disaster is the convention of the present state. What, then, makes for new configurations of meanings that, in turn, render new material, new shapes, heretofore unimagined?

For Martin, writing poetry into the “undisciplined and rebellious” space of radical black poetics is complicated by the trappings of English, a language the poet Vaughan Rapatahana has described as a “voracious hydra” of linguistic imperialism. Or as Martin succinctly puts it in Life In a Box Is a Pretty Life, “Their syntax wants definition of this body.” In her new collection, she counters this tension with an explosion of syntax, an opening:

I do not think lovers

are savior. We open

a portal/portals.

Instructions for the Lovers is divided into four parts. The first section, “Service,” circles the figure of the mother, the poet at once letting go and unable to let go. The intersection of comfort and pain in this relationship presents as a kind of forbidden pleasure: a “fetish,” writes Martin. The historian William Pietz has described the word fetish as having a “sinister pedigree” dating back to the origins of the transatlantic slave trade, when fifteenth-century Portuguese sailors identified the spiritually animated objects they encountered on imperialist “explorations” of the West African coast as the talismans of witchcraft: feitiços, from the Latin facticius, meaning “manufactured, artificial.” The coastline itself would later become known as the “Slave Coast.” As a “fetish,” then, the mother is at once a revered idol, a false idol, a kink, and an object of linguistic colonization. 

The second section, “Instructions for the Lovers,” considers the “long tail” of loving, in which desire, anguish, and “the sublime beauty of respite” occupy an unstable temporal plane, collapsed into a pulsing blur of becoming and unbecoming: “The lover persists in loverness,” Martin writes, “and then, poof.” The third section, “Notes in Relation,” is an evisceration of American hypocrisy and the “ornate buildings meant / to keep us safe.” And in the final section, “The Photographs: Black Aliveness,” Martin presents memories—or, perhaps more accurately, moments of being—as distinct snatches of radiance, a kind of counterpoint to the crashing sensory waves of the “loverness” passages.

The collection is bookended by two more poems. The opening “[After wind was water]” is scattered across nearly blank pages; its few words are severed from their sentences and appear stranded amidst the heavy quiet of white stock. The poem might be best described by a framework Martin pays homage to elsewhere in the collection: scholar Christina Sharpe’s proposal that anti-black racism should be understood not as distinct incidents, locatable on a historical timeline, but rather as “weather”—a pervasive, ongoing, all-encompassing climate. Viewed through this framework, Martin’s “[After wind was water]” becomes a continuously unfolding event; when the white space of the page subsumes the dislocated text, water engulfs a body, anti-blackness swallows a black voice, and the page itself is implicated in the silencing of testimony.

Anti-black weather, Sharpe writes, is an atmospheric phenomenon, a singularity that “produces new ecologies” and “necessitates changeability and improvisation.” One such improvisation is self-invention. “Our / gesture’s flower,” Martin writes. “Our gestures / bloom.” These spare lines bear the weight of anti-black weather: Speech is cut off, and the gesture of drowning is ever-present in the motion of an arm in water. At the same time, Martin’s words mark the sustained creativity required to endure, regenerate. Also suggested in the poem’s lost-and-found silence: the lover’s near wordless stuttering of desire. This total climate. This fruit.

It matters that Martin’s book begins in the first-person plural; Instructions for the Lovers seeks the communion of collectivity. Yet the poet hungers too for a more solitary, internal communion: “The way a child body can walk through the blizzard unbeknownst to anyone, invisible and deep inside of her own feeling space.” Later, this same urge manifests as “horny / contentedness.” 

Alas, a person trying to be her own ideal lover is readily interrupted by the “industry” of her brain. “The I emerges,” Martin warns, early in the book: “a staff, a kingdom.” A kingdom demands subjects; violent subjugation of others asserts and delineates a king’s singularity. This kingly “I” both subsumes and alienates, insisting on the primacy of one individual while denying anyone else autonomy. In such a climate, selfhood is prized as a scarcity.

The staff of the imperious “I” is a cursed weapon, and those who seek it will find themselves ruled by it. It contains what Martin has called the “trickeries of (self)destruction.” Think of Brecht’s frustrated recruiting sergeant: “I’ve been in places where they haven’t had a war in seventy years and you know what? These people haven’t even been given names! They don’t know who they are! War fixes that.” The regime uses a person’s name toward what Martin calls “savage containment.” The “I” fixes you in your place.

By choosing the word “service” as the title for the first section of her book, Martin underscores the extent to which the violence of this dynamic is normalized—and sanitized—in daily life in the United States. “Service” describes a power dynamic in which one person’s material wealth can command another to perform a task on their behalf—a relationship ennobled by the Christian conception of worship as servitude. Even in its most apparently mundane use—think of customer service, or military service—“service” reframes subjugation as a social good, a pious duty to “natural” hierarchy.

In Instructions for the Lovers, service is what the survivors of slave ships “shivered into.” It is one woman washing another’s clothes; it is rape. “Speaking of service,” Martin continues, “I thought that lovers were a / resemblance for my use.” The staff of selfhood infiltrates even our most intimate relationships. It’s lonely, this relentless self-assertion. The tantalizing prospect of happiness and care is thwarted, even at the moment of arrival: “To locate / oneself in place can be a horrible thing / depending on the place / and the self.”

Just as inhabiting a location means encountering its weather, to orient oneself in place is to acknowledge that the conditions of selfhood are not linear or discrete. The self of Instructions for the Lovers is surrounded—by the “big past” of historical collective trauma, as well as by what Martin has called “the narrow self-indulgent past of personal invasion.” At times, this self is so hemmed in by the past it seems nearly impossible for her identity to take any shape outside the one predetermined by context. Her “I” ossifies. In the first poem of the “Service” section, Martin writes:

The I feels nothing about it now, is

gibberish to say, to healing.

We could say, instead, we sand the hardened—

like rip, like why even bother with refusal.

A person who has been subsumed into service is denied autonomy. Trapped in a box, she hardens until she becomes interchangeable with it. She moves through her own life like “aimless driftwood.” Yet when she is given “a life to carry around and nurture its preciousness, to say ‘me’,” there is nowhere to go.

The motif of the box or cage is a recurring one in Martin’s writing. In her 2015 book, Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life, the very form of a poem is a “grid object” that constrains the poet and her body. The book that followed, Good Stock, Strange Blood, was written, Martin notes, “in the summer of Sandra Bland and then the summer of Freddie Gray, and then some cute kid was shot in a big-box store while holding a toy gun, and so many other deaths, unexplained in the logics of the rationality we hold so dear. . . . The past isn’t the past but the present.” The living are confined to cereal boxes; the murdered to plastic coffins. In this summer of institutionally sanctioned murder, the poet wakes each morning to “a fireheart grief” and drinks her coffee “into the griefmouth.”

Instructions for the Lovers might be understood as a mapping of the possibilities of speech from and through the griefmouth. It keeps company with Renee Gladman’s geographies, Claudia Rankine’s encounters, and Sharpe’s notes—anti-doctrines, as Martin writes in Letters to the Future. This is writing that doubles as an act of living, an “unwriting” of a syntax that would claim a definition of Blackness and regulate the “feeling space” within and between people. “I’ll be home soon,” Martin promises in this new collection, “so / be sweet and be faithful. Hold that space for me.”  

In its un-writing of body and mind, Instructions for the Lovers situates lovers as people embarked on the futurist project of closeness. These lovers are not a concept or a category. They are specific, as indicated by the odd-looking definite article in the book’s title. The lovers already exist, holding and closing the space between “the abject and bliss,” as Martin writes in Life in a Box and in Good Stock, “the distance between the ‘I’ and the ‘you.’” In terms of sex, the lovers can probably go at it without much instruction; they’re post-verbal that way, and blow right past the problematized body. For the lovers, the body is not a hypothesis.

The challenge is how to live as they love: oriented toward pleasure in oneself and in company—“the sweat of some hot stranger in your mouth.” This is beautiful adventure, writes Martin:

Did I tell you it’s raining?

It’s not hard to think that it’s already night and necessary,

how any green is a wild form, and lastly, I don’t want to

inspire devotion if it means the I becomes separated from the world.

Here is a lover vibrating with exaltation and attunement, a poet registering “the particulars.” (Including: “The first touch in a dark bar hallway, just the right pressure, a voluptuous sinking.”) Touching, tasting, and listening. Instructions for the Lovers is a sonic collection, and sonically fastidious. The poet hears the gap between the world and the speaking I in the ka-ka-clunk of an anapest. “Hey, firestar,” she whispers, in seduction. Speech is exposure. The poet deplores bleating, punditry, “feather mouth mumbles,” quibbling, white noise. Worst of all are hollow words:

Meanwhile, outside the gates

obsessive chatter about Freedom

which they said was

doing whatever you want

whenever you want

with whom or what

In Instructions for the Lovers, “freedom” is a jingle. “I did not make up this song,” observes Martin, adding coolly: “Design Within Reach is having a ‘Work from home sale.’” There is better singing to be had in the “distinctive sensation of one’s own vernacular background”:

Say, “nest,” say my anchor,

my glory, my sister’s arm draped around me. Worlds

in that drape.

In her acknowledgements, Martin explains that the long final poem of the collection, “D+S on Lovers,” began as a text message exchange. As two interlocutors muse on desire, sex, and possibility, their replies to one another arrive on the page with a secret, exhilarating ping: the heady eroticism of receiving a message, of knowing that someone is asking to be in dialogue with you. For D and S, the dialogue of “loverness” has the open-ended nature of artistic collaboration—a relationship that is, at its essence, a project of discovery. As one of the lovers explains:

I used to be

full of holes looking

for other holes to

mirror my holes or

other things to fill my

holes, which were of

course unfillable. Now

the holes are portals

into the bliss of the

complicated human

experience, which is

physical and

nonphysical at the

same time.

D and S are attempting to comprehend love without delimiting it; the fizzing joy of their exchange is matched by scrupulous concentration. Even the poem’s function words (of, into, or) can’t be depended on for hard-and-fast meaning. For instance, is bliss a single component of complicated experience or its outcome? Should a portal into bliss face inward or out? Does a person full of holes want resolution or release? The slipperiness of “D+S on Lovers,” and the pair’s willingness to stay with that slipperiness—with anger and grief as well as sex and love—is part of the poem’s exhilarating tension. As their billets-doux speed through the cosmos and return to earth as buzz after buzz of a cellphone in a pocket, D and S expand loverness to “a homecoming, a remembering of what it feels like to be alive.” This isn’t salvation. A portal, like a homecoming, is a vantage point from which one can see more of the total landscape.

The lovers in Instructions for the Lovers are not reliable; their instability is key to their bravado, anti-authoritarianism, and sex appeal. But Martin does find steadfast tenderness and knowledge in “the cunt’s expansive well.” In Instructions for the Lovers, the cunt too is a griefmouth. Consumed, consuming: “the radiant abyss.”

Evangeline Riddiford Graham is the author of poetry chapbooks La belle dame avec les mains vertes and Ginesthoi. Her recent writing can be found in Los Angeles Review of Books, Art News Aotearoa, Divagations, and Landfall. She hosts and produces the poetry podcast Multi-Verse.