Reception

J. Michael Martinez

A sky as blue as her
dress spirals
as her hair as black as
​                the pupil’s center

& if love is
the cascade through
the other ends
            of yellow

then mended:
our day sung
all life closer
          would we be

ourselves outside
our most echoed     
sun spill
       taunting fear

a summer glass
to sacrifice
such common bruises
                 and you eve

                only the death
                sleep over my flaws

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J. Michael Martinez  Longlisted for the National Book Award, winner of the National Poetry Series, and a recipient of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, J. Michael Martinez is the author of three collections of poetry.  He is the Poetry Editor of NOEMI Press and his writings have been anthologized in Ahsahta Press' "The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral," Rescue Press' "The New Census: 40 American Poets," and Counterpath Press' "Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing."  A Visiting Assistant Professor of Poetry at St. Lawrence University, J. Michael lives in upstate NY.

​About the work: "The year has seen a tremendous change in my life: a move to NY state from Colorado and I am fortunate to have gotten married to an amazing partner.  Dialogue with a new environment and at new levels of intimacy are transforming my language and my poetics, demanding an even deeper honesty and self-revelation.  I don't know where these illuminations will lead, however, I have always preferred the question to any kind of answer. "

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The Art

Digital Disconnect by Hildy Maze, 36 x 48, oil, paper, collage, 2019

Hildy Maze is an East Hampton-based artist. Hildy Maze visually explores how the mind interprets and appreciates, distorts, and projects the images we perceive and the thoughts and emotions we struggle with. Focusing on abstract contemplative figurative images developed with the view that art can awaken us to the obscurations that cloud our mind from recognizing the clarity of awareness that is our inherent nature. With her experience of Tibetan Buddhist meditation, she uses oil on paper, drawing, painting, and collage to intimately describe how our active mind creates collages of thoughts and patterns, as in a dream. If we examine our thoughts, we can see they are fragmented, impressionable, and empty of solidity. “None of us can avoid thoughts,” she says, “but through awareness of our pitfalls, beauty, strengths, and weaknesses we can open windows onto the mind”. She is interested in the study of how the mind works as a means of gaining insight into how we communicate, how we create an identity through form, emotions, and consciousness, and how we hide in that creation. She explains that essentially this work is about all of us and the empty, clear, and unconditional nature of mind we all have. Hildy has exhibited her work throughout the U.S. including NYC, Long Island City, Brooklyn, California, and Beijing, China. She has won numerous awards and is in several private collections in the    U.S, Europe, and Asia.

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