Dawn Lundy Martin was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for her first poetry collection, A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering. A founding member of the Black Took Collective, a group of experimental black poets, she is an associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat) investigates the ways in which language claims absolute knowledge and draws a box around lived experience. Martin writes poems that seek out moments when the box buckles, or breaks, poems that suggest there is more. Life in a Box is a Pretty Life continues Martin’s investigation into what is produced in the interstices between the body, experience, and language, and how alternative narratives can yield some other knowledge about what it means to be black (or female, or queer) in contemporary America.
