On Richard Martin 

Richard Martin’s poems bring us face to face with the grim reality faced every day in a hospital, any hospital. From nurse to doctor, chaplain to administrator to orderly, we see how hospital employees react to the circumstances of their work. But the center of this collection are the patients. Martin’s series on mental patients and cancer patients are powerful and riveting and lead to the inevitable question which grows out of these poems: ‘How can one man stand this work?’ The answer lies in Martin’s tough yet compassion stance.       Jim Daniels, 
   on Dream of Long Headdress: Poems from a Thousand Hospitals

Richard Martin knows how our profound sorrow moves. He is the chronicler of the empty dynamism of this culture, but he knows its joys too. In the fast-paced world of his verse there beats a fierce and oddly tonic heart.
     Andrei Codrescu,
    on White Man Appears on Southern California Beach

I’ve read your Modulations with real pleasure, liking the energy of your wit and invention. Everything resonates, and there’s one verbal surprise after another…What’s valuable in these poems is your escaping the all-too-usual triteness of the ametrical free-form poem that everybody writes nowadays (and reads in an adenoidal whine with fierce seriousness). The great American contribution to poetry may, after all, be sass (it’s in Mark Twain and Whitman, in Wallace Stevens and WCW). The Scots and Irish are good at it, but as far as I know, nobody else. Many other virtues, also: idealism, a good eye, a respect for the language, and your heart in the right place. Congratulations & envy –
   Guy Davenport,
   on Modulations

“The sun is big…and we’re debris” and there is a lot to talk about in between. The voice of the anti-hero moves from “clumps of hard experience” to “silence and rivers.” The consciousness of writing from “moment to moment” displays autobiography, travel, work, romance. All that makes up the life of Richard Martin. Get a drink, sit down, read and respond.
    Joanne Kyger,
   on Marks

I love Richard Martin’s Sideways! I love the strangely graceful way he bounces the abstract off the concrete, as if they were interchangeable, and the tonal combination of Dadaist irony with romantic lyricism. There are so many word-salad poets calling themselves cutting edge writers. It’s refreshing to read someone who maintains a sense of the poem as a closed form without in any way compromising the open resonance of radical modernism.
   Stephen-Paul Martin,
   on Sideways

This sophisticated poetry book consists of five sections, four of which originally appeared as stand-alone chapbooks. Each uses specific formal devices—from sonnets to free verse to meter—while Martin’s thematic obsessions appear throughout—language, love, humor. Martin also makes liberal use of collage and parataxis, which puts him squarely in the Pound-Williams tradition, in spite of his occasional use of tradition.
   Jefferson Hansen,
   on Under the Sky of No Complaint

The lines of Richard Martin’s poems have the crisp offhandedness of wire brushes deftly applied to drum skin. Indeed, they are musical, sensational and breed philosophical considerations. The lines seem to want to slip by unassumingly but that you pause on them because the words they are written in recall so appropriately a world you know–– a world that they illuminate and thus add to, rather than describe. Whole poems work that way, with a power and fascination that seem to have come from nowhere, or just around the corner.
   Bill Berkson,
   on Techniques in the Neighborhood of Sleep

A fugue, a bouquet, a squall, a ballet of lexical pirouettes … how to describe these unique swirls of dizzying virtuosity? These new poems are oracular lenses peering into the soul’s inscrutable dimensions, laughing, musing, mourning, dazzling … a kaleidoscope beamed through a prism to focus unseeable beauty. Richard Martin is a one of-a-kind visionary, transcribing existence into highly-charged, sophisticated ode/codas. He is a model of his motto: “Be in the paradigm-shifting business.
   Jeffery Cyphers Wright,
   on Ceremony of the Unknown

The book is too good to be legal. Dick Martin’s lawless imagination consumes language at an alarming rate, seemingly heedless of conserving a literary future, and leaving in its wake reality-induced characters like drugs for addicts.
   Richard Blevins,
   on Chapter & Verse