November 10, 2022

Martin Willitts Jr, winner of the 2016 Turtle Island Quarterly Editor’s Choice Chapbook Award for his Flowstone Collection The Wire Fence Holding Back the World, returns with another great collection.

Not Only the Extraordinary are Entering the Dream World has such temporary beauty, that if you blink, you might miss the brief moment. You find yourself speechless. You wonder if you are in a dream world or if you imagined the moment. These poems want you to notice the world, whether it is camping in parks or climbing mountains (“the dizzy tightness of the heart”), or white-water rapids. This world is at risk with climate change with heat extremes, water levels lowering, hurricanes, de-forestation, how we are interconnected like the silk worms to the survival of certain trees. Also, love is fragile and can be at risk. We can discover different ways to see love in these poems, often centered in nature. “Centeredness” and “meditative” are good adjectives for these poems. Each poem toward the end becomes quieter and quieter, until the last poem which takes the reader out of this world into another reality, “all love reaches a certain velocity.”

You can purchase the book now from our Bookshop.org store or from Amazon.com.