FIRMAMENT
2024 Wandering Aengus Book Award
In the intimate and lyrical poems of Firmament, Christopher Martin is wanderer and observer wading through natural and spiritual landscapes as he considers "what it means to die yet remain bound to a living thing" and how our connection to nature is our connection to spirituality. With Martin as unflinching guide, we’re shown what’s temporary and what’s permanent, what it means not to turn away, and how to find redemption amidst injustice. Every poem in this collection feels like a revelation. /// Jenny Sadre-Orafai, author of Dear Outsiders and Malak
We live within place names, histories large and small, the families we create and our families of origin, but how does a person come into their own? How does one manifest their own sense of faith via the roles of father, son, citizen, poet, and earth-steward? In Christopher Martin’s insightful and often stunning collection Firmament, coming into one’s own involves the will and guts to say no to your inheritance, to question all that has been handed to you. Whether that be a religion, a country’s history, an acceptance of hurt from those closest to you or a trust in your own instincts born from human vulnerability and earth-bound revelations. These poems live in the parallel realms of the natural world that can be counted on for peace and beauty, and the faulty human world that often fails us, but which we cannot live without. Each of us finding shelter / in all the living and the dead/ given to the understory. /// Tina Schuman, Poetry Editor of Wandering Aengus Press and author of Boneyard Heresies and Praising the Paradox
Christopher Martin’s Firmament is a masterpiece of specificity. Place-based not only in his native state of Georgia, but beside certain creeks, rivers, and roads, on Kennesaw Mountain and its Civil War battlefield, at the Etowah American Indian mounds. His poems also include an abundance of fauna—blue herons, gulf fritillaries, salamanders, buzzards, a bison, sandhill cranes. It’s a world so rich you can sense the humidity, smell the loamy earth, get the urge to hit the trail yourself. Although Martin expresses a distrust of fundamental religion, Firmament is a deeply spiritual book, full of reverence and of solace found in the natural world. This is a poet who feels deeply and seeks answers; this is a collection that satisfies the soul. /// Kathleen Brewin Lewis, author of Magicicada
THIS GLADDENING LIGHT
2018 Georgia Author of the Year Award in Memoir
2017 Will D. Campbell Award in Creative Nonfiction
One of AJC's "best and brightest Southern books for summer 2017"
Part memoir, part essay collection, part spiritual journal, This Gladdening Light offers a unique perspective on the interconnectedness of universal themes—doubt and devotion, childhood and parenthood, disconnection and ecological mindfulness, anguish and empathy—all told at the level of the ground. This nonfiction debut from Christopher Martin is, ultimately, a work of belonging. Through narrative prose that moves between a rain-soaked Appalachian cove, Thoreau’s hut site at Walden Pond, hospital rooms in Atlanta and Cherokee County, Civil War battlefields crossed by highways, and the suburbanized, ore-red hills of northwest Georgia, Martin paints a spirituality of the ordinary, of the creaturely world. Lyrical meditation abounds here, too, where wasps enduring in derelict farm machinery, wildflowers dwelling on the rocks of Arabia Mountain, and two children—whether singing old R.E.M. songs, seeking insignificant butterflies in a roadside ditch, or simply abiding within the timbre of their mother’s heartbeat—all embody an “anonymous and unknown Christ who comes in merciful hiddenness to the distraught pilgrim,” as Thomas Merton wrote. This spirituality of the ordinary cannot ignore violence and injustice—the turmoil so often dismissed by manifestations of faith that lean toward prosperity, individualistic salvation, and the otherworldly. One of the most poignant moments in this book, for example, finds Martin, the same week that racist terror struck Charleston, sitting at the edge of a Civil War battlefield where “some of the wounded burned alive where they fell,” stumbling—and failing—to answer his child’s questions about war and death. The Gospel of Mary asks its readers to follow the “child of true humanity” that exists within. This Gladdening Light is no map to that inner child, as no map exists. But it is certainly one path along the pilgrimage.
With the eye of a poet and heart of a saint, Christopher Martin explores a theology of love in this honest, gritty, and transcendent book. /// Janisse Ray, author Wild Spectacle and Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
It is extraordinary that this insightful work comes from a young writer, whose reflections on religion, nature, literature, and family create a synthesis of ideas and imagery that is as pleasurable to read as it is effecting. /// Anthony Grooms, author of The Vain Conversation and Bombingham
Our reward is Martin’s honesty, bravery, and winning prose. /// Erik Reece, author of Utopia Drive and Lost Mountain
Steeped in the physical and political environs of the American south and spiritually inheriting from both Thoreau's Walden and Ray's Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, This Gladdening Light is a poignant, lyrical, and heartfelt expression of the divinity within our planet and ourselves. /// Guatam Narula, author of Remain Free
Martin speaks with an unfettered heart about family, nature, life, and death in a beautiful collection of essays that are both relatable and poignant. He is bold in articulating what many of us think, but maybe are too afraid to say. /// Cristina M. Martin, founding editor of Loose Change Magazine
[An] effervescent debut... /// Tray Butler, AJC
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