New From the Porch: Still Life With City

by Marc Di Martino
97pps, $10 US
ISBN-13: 978-1-948920-23-0
ISBN-10: 1-948920-23-9

Still Life with City, Marc Alan Di Martino’s second collection, features poems about the Velvet Underground playing live in 1969, CBGBs in the heyday of the late 1970s, working in famous – and infamous – New York City bookshops, the aftermath of 9/11, and getting lost looking for Cavafy in Rome. From the seedy seductions of Times Square to the ‘rain-tortured streets’ of the Eternal City, the author escorts his reader through urban mythologies steeped in personal experience. These poems offer glimpses into a lost world, one which is often right before our eyes.

“…a dizzying collection teeming with stories, the urge to recount, and restless catalogs of incessant movement. What redemption, what still life he finds, he locates in the city of language.”

—Donna Masini, author of 4:30 Movie

“…a glorious meditation on what it means to be an artist…like watercolor brushed generously across a gleaming sheet of paper.”

—Francesca Bell, author of Bright Stain