In Nighthawks, Lisa Martin traces a creaturely interconnectedness, traversing land, ecology, and other boundaries amid crises unfolding at a global scale. These poems parse aspects of human embodiment-emotion, relationship, mortality-and reflect on how to live through moments of intense personal and political upheaval. Long verses about the remnants of marriage and divorce, and a sonnet cycle about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, sit alongside lyrical explorations of midlife loneliness, mothering, and grief. Philosophical ruminations on form and language are also present, asking what good is a poem, a verse, in a world so full of things one might hold an aversion to? "What if I write a line, follow it in, what if / the line tears what I didn't mean to open?" Martin's experimental collection engages in exquisite emotional truth-telling, asking how we can hold and tend the world with more attunement and care.
In Nighthawks, Lisa Martin traces a creaturely interconnectedness, traversing land, ecology, and other boundaries amidst crises unfolding at a global scale.
In Nighthawks, Lisa Martin manifests a creaturely interconnectedness, traversing land, ecology, and other boundaries amidst crises unfolding at a global scale.
"Lisa Martin's poems are written from the perspective of an 'expert / in worrying about the future,' imbuing Nighthawks with both consciousness and conscience, upping the emotional stakes of living in a 'storm coming, wind / alter[ed]' world." Jim Johnstone, author of The King of Terrors
"Lisa Martin articulates grief as one who has been long familiar with its company. The poems in Nighthawks pay exquisite attention to the furled inner world of grief as it opens again to the light." Jenna Butler, author of Revery: A Year of Bees # 5 on the Edmonton Poetry Bestseller List, March 8, 2026 # 10 on the Edmonton Poetry Bestseller List, March 15, 2026 # 10 on the Edmonton Poetry Bestseller List, March 22, 2026 # 1 on the Edmonton Poetry Bestseller List, April 5, 2026
• I.
• Synaesthetic
• Two
• Take Down
• Ars Poetica
• Poem at the Closing of a Door
• Mid Life
• The News
• If You Really Aren't a Racist, Take This Online Test
• Elegy
• Typology
• II.
• The Point
• Para-texts
• When There Is No Remedy For It
• Post-partum
• Questions of Being
• Feminist Philosophy
• Left Breast with Lymph
• Accommodation
• Advanced Ethics for the Ex-Communicated
• Anti-Anxiety (a Homeopathic)
• III.
• Beaverhill Lake
• Notes on Arrivals and Departures
• Bare Posts, Barbed Wire
• Field Guide to the Birds of Alberta
• Assertions of Likeness
• Objects of the Marriage
• A Song, or Call
• Love
• Verge
• Nighthawks
• Acknowledgements
