From Publishers Weekly
King (Separate Parts) attended the fabled Black Mountain College in the mid-1950s: her short stories suggest the spare hardness and amused diffidence of Black Mountain poet Robert Creeley; wrenching plot twists and the instability of narrative itself-King often interrupts to discard or evaluate the proceedings-root her best work in the postmodern contingency forged by Black Mountain teacher John Cage. In "Conversation in Connecticut," the entire arc of a failed novelist's life gets condensed into a single revelation. "Dog Box" moves its focus violently inward from a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood to a box on an art dealer's mantle. The collection's second half has one foot in the courtly landscape of the Old South (where King grew up), the other itching to escape to an "arts underworld." The narrators, often unnamed and female, reveal King's keen sensitivity to the caste system separating men and women, à la Tillie Olsen. King is more interested in demolishing notions of character in fiction than in character itself (although she's good at repulsive guys, young and old). These stories form the pinned edges of a very broad canvas.
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About the Author
Martha King's most recent book, Seventeen Walking Sticks (Stop Press, 1997) is a cycle of poems in response to drawings by Basil King. Her other books of poetry are Weather (New Rivers Press), Women and Children First (2+2 Press), Islamic Miniature (Lee/Lucas Press) and Monday Through Friday (Zelot Press). Her poems have appeared in small press magazines including IO, Chelsea, Mulch, Ikon, Contact II, New American Writing, Synaesthetic, Optimism (Czech Republic) and Radical Poetics (U.K.). Her prose/fiction and essays have appeared in Hanging Loose, North Carolina Literary Review, House Organ, Bomb, St. Mark's Poetry Project Newsletter, and First Intensity, among others. Selected works are in the following anthologies: A Decade and Then Some/Intrepid Anthology, Allen Deloach, editor (Intrepid Press); Woman and Nature, Susan Griffin, editor (Harper & Row); Sparks of Fire: Blake in a New Age, James Bogan and Fred Gross, editors (North Atlantic Books); Pegansen fran Prarien, Peter Trachtenberg, editor (Hammarstrom & Aberg); Chain, Jena Osman and Juliana Spahr, editors (University of Buffalo); The Taking of Hands, C. W. Truesdale, editor (New Rivers Press). Mrs. King was the editor of the poetry zine Giants Play Well in the Drizzle which floated free to readers from 1983 to 1992, and the much shorter lived Northern Lights Poetry Chaplets Series (1993-95). She is a professional science writer and is currently director of publications for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society in the U.S. where she edited the prize-winning quarterly magazine, InsideMS.
