The Desert Split Open presents Alexandra Martinez

Friday, October 20, 5-7 PM, the Desert Split Open is excited to present local poet Alexandra Martinez. Let’s meet at The Firehouse (65430 Winters Road, Joshua Tree, CA). Alexandra will read from her collection, Our Lady of Perpetual Desert, which won Inlandia’s Hillary Gravendyk Prize. Following her reading, she will sit down for a brief conversation with Susan Rukeyser, who is likely to ask about the collection’s various feminist themes and Alexandra’s personal experience as a poet, so far! Then we will break for complimentary refreshments and an opportunity to purchase copies of the book, signed by the author.

We know October is a busy month, with Art Tours and the JTMF, but we hope you will make a little time for poetry. Don’t miss what is sure to be a special event at this singular venue.

From the publisher:

“In Our Lady of Perpetual Desert, Hillary Gravendyk Prize-winning poet Alexandra Martinez mulls over the poet's existence in the United States. It is less a book about cultural identity than about class, power, and maintaining hope in the struggle against oppressive norms and structures. Concise indictments of an unjust society are deftly disguised as poems about nature, work, and family. In Our Lady of Perpetual Desert, the desert and California aren't only background landscapes but characters.”

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“In Our Lady of Perpetual Desert, a collection of poems both personal and political, Alexandra Martinez peels back layers of expectation and assumption to offer her own citrus heart as participant and witness to uncertainty, insecurity, and injustice. … What is it like to live between deserts? Open these pages, and Martinez will show you.”

– Matthew Woodman, 2022 Kern County Poet Laureate

“Threaded throughout with provocative thoughts on climate change, being female, immigration, and the mythology surrounding the American Dream, Our Lady of Perpetual Desert offers a fresh and bittersweet fairytale of landscapes and legends in the American West.”

– Megan Gravendyk Estrella, Judge, Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Prize

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– Check out this recent review by Susan Abbott at Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library: https://www.chollaneedles.com/2023/09/book-review-our-lady-of-perpetual.html

– Watch the book trailer here:

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