{"id":66,"date":"2022-08-06T19:59:14","date_gmt":"2022-08-06T19:59:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marthacarlsoneditor.com\/?page_id=66"},"modified":"2025-01-02T15:51:33","modified_gmt":"2025-01-02T20:51:33","slug":"books-by-martha","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/marthacarlsoneditor.com\/?page_id=66","title":{"rendered":"Books by Martha"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Contact Martha<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes, I do read, write, edit fiction, as well as coach fiction writers \u2014 but earlier in my career I published several collections of poetry under the name Martha Carlson-Bradley:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Begin with Trouble<\/em><\/strong>
Granite State Poetry Series, Hobblebush Books, 2017
Publisher’s description: The poems of Begin with Trouble<\/em> often lift, erase, disarrange, or subvert the language of the 1727 New-England Primer<\/em> \u2014 a book read by children in New England and beyond throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. Whole communities, whole generations of children were introduced both to reading and to a world view that asserted “our God is a consuming Fire.” In Begin with Trouble, <\/em>Carlson-Bradley captures different voices in these communities, from children struggling with class and mortality, duty and the afterlife, to an elderly Native American survivor of internment and an enslaved young man from Africa. The connotations of the book as a physical object also speak throughout Begin with Trouble<\/em> \u2014 as does the twenty-first-century narrator, who discovers that archives contain timeless messages of desire, fear, regret, and an enduring need for human connection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cInspired by the small book the New-England Primer<\/em> of 1727, Martha Carlson-Bradley brings to life the world of the New England Puritans, a world where a stern God chooses the elect and is to be adored and feared, where obedience to that God is paramount for he \u2018reckons your worth,\u2019 where \u2018cruel death is always near\u2019 and work is highly valued. I love these precise, intelligent, compassionate poems for their perfect blend of history, scholarship, imagination and poetry. And especially for their portrayal of the primer itself, its woodcuts, its pages, and for the power of the voices that speak from the poems. This is a book to be read slowly and savored and then read again.\u201d <\/p>\n\u2014 Patricia Fargnoli, Hallowed: New & Selected Poems<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cBegin with Trouble<\/em>\u00a0is in essence a letterpress book, which through its very making both tells and reverses its story \u2014 that of the Fall, of dominion and divide, of \u2018the down low and the \/ up high\u2019 as embodied by the lessons of\u00a01727 New-England Primer<\/em>.\u00a0Martha Carlson Bradley brings to the fore, with her own sharp-edged lines, the mortality of all humanly formulated mandates that arise from the great transpersonal stories. This is a book for our time in which, like then, perhaps like always, deep and life-giving truths are refused and in their place, \u2018ink, uneven, creates \/ odd wraiths that writhe \/ through a group of children\u2019s faces.\u2019 It invites us to imagine an otherwise, to give the children of the world another story to live by. In\u00a0Begin with Trouble\u00a0<\/em>Martha Carlson Bradley has given us the kind of book on which our lives depend.\u201d <\/p>\n\u2014 Diane Gilliam, Dreadful Wind & Rain<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Sea Called Fruitfulness<\/em><\/strong>
WordTech Editions, 2013
Publisher’s description: In this collection of lyric poems responding to a 1651 lunar map, the narrator ponders the motivation and lives of the two seventeenth-century astronomers who created this map, also exploring terrains of achievement and failure, intimacy and solitude, celibacy and fertility, certainty and unknowing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“‘What interests me most about a work of art is the artist’s quality of mind,’ said Henry James famously. Add heart and spirit and engaging intersecting stories and you get what interests me most about Martha Carlson-Bradley’s Sea Called Fruitfulness. <\/em>What she teases out of the lives and life’s work of two seventeenth-century Jesuit astronomers creates the character of the writer of this book that is itself a kind of moon map in which we vividly see our own very human faces. This picture is also a wonder, because Martha Carlson-Bradley draws it so well.”<\/p>\n\u2014 Michael Ryan, God Hunger<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 If I Take You Here<\/em><\/strong>
Adastra Press, 2011\u200b
Publisher’s description: When you stand amid the rubble that was the house your mother grew up in and where you visited grandparents, the mind and heart grasp at fragments of memories. These poems, glorious and sad, are this story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“Martha Carlson-Bradley has woven together poems of appealing and clear images that churn up visuals as you read. \u2026 [The poems evoke] everyday things that we tend to overlook, even as poets, because we are too busy with our own lives, our own language to notice the obvious and make it not only creatively accessible to a reader, but provide a quick, Oh, I wish I\u2019d thought of that.”<\/p>\n\u2014 Zvi A. Sesling, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 \u200bSeason We Can\u2019t Resist<\/strong><\/em>
WordTech, 2007
Publisher’s description: The speaker of the poems in Season We Can’t Resist<\/em> strives to find a true sense of scale and context for human experience, exploring fertility, science, history, climate, time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“Season \u2026 is a miracle of language and observation. \u2026 You can walk through these poems like a forest; you can lose your own body in the bodies of the mushrooms and ferns, the lush and decay of it all. Lyrical and lovely, they’re an invocation for the always-changing world.” <\/p>\n\u2014 Jane Eklund, The Story So Far<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 \u200bBeast at the Hearth<\/em><\/strong>
Adastra, 2005 
Publisher’s description: Beast at the Hearth<\/em> explores the passage from childhood into sexually awakened adulthood by retelling three Grimm Brothers’ tales, all variations on the beauty and beast story. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“The poet’s eye that roams through Beast at the Hearth<\/em> is wild with attention. It’s cinematic in its selectivity, its willingness to hold a frame in focus until what’s shown shimmers with possibility. \u2026 Carlson-Bradley \u2026 understands that the power of fairy tales lies not in their distance from real human life but in their proximity to it. The desires, disguises, and disappointments in these poems are our kin, our kind. By stripping the tales to the most essential \u2014 but never predictable \u2014 details, Martha Carlson-Bradley gives mythic revision a fresh, contemporary voice.”<\/p>\n\u2014 Jeanne Marie Beaumont, co-editor of The Poets’ Grimm<\/em> <\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Nest Full of Cries<\/strong><\/em>
Adastra Press, 2000
Publisher\u2019s description: The twenty poems in this series are further speculations on the Hansel and Gretel tale. They contrast the innocence of childhood with the realism of a family in need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“With precision, passion, and insight, Martha Carlson-Bradley strips a familiar Grimm tale to its terrifying essence in this subtle and haunting sequence \u2026 This is poetry of great compression and resonance; it is what poetry should be.”\u00a0<\/p>\n\u2014 Joan Aleshire, Happily<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Contact me,<\/a><\/strong> and let’s talk about your work in progress.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Contact Martha Yes, I do read, write, edit fiction, as well as coach fiction writers \u2014 but earlier in my career I published several collections of poetry under the name Martha Carlson-Bradley: \u2022 Begin with TroubleGranite State Poetry Series, Hobblebush Books, 2017Publisher’s description: The poems of Begin with Trouble often lift, erase, disarrange, or subvert […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-66","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marthacarlsoneditor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/66","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marthacarlsoneditor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marthacarlsoneditor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marthacarlsoneditor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marthacarlsoneditor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/marthacarlsoneditor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/66\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":344,"href":"https:\/\/marthacarlsoneditor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/66\/revisions\/344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marthacarlsoneditor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}