In the Time of Assignments [Paperback]

Douglas A. Martin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 28, 2008

In the Time of Assignments transforms a decade’s worth of feeling into a lyrical collection of verse. Readers familiar with Martin’s work will find a repurposing and revelation of the foundations for his prior experiments in prose. The work is divided into three parts, each with a geographical marker indicating the narrator’s evolving identity, from the formative, Red State landscape that colors the first section through the widening horizons, growing sexual awareness, and crush of experience found in the final two. The beautifully fragmentary narrative exhibited in Martin’s novels takes hold here in long, poetic sequences and angled interludes; lyric is the steady underpinning.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Soft Skull Press (January 28, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0979663601
• ISBN-13: 978-0979663604
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,054,437 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a compulsive read, February 12, 2008

By 

Carolyn Matthews (England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: In the Time of Assignments (Paperback)

You certainly get your money's worth here - lots of lyrical poems and fragments written over a 10 year period which link together as one book, or even as one long poem.

There are a few poems where I wasn't quite sure what was going on (probably because I'm not American) but it doesn't matter because I just got seduced into the rhythm of the language.

Some poems have an almost musical quality ('prague bus' is a good example). Some poems (my favourite is `I move to new york to be a poet') are just wonderful. The words are always cleverly and carefully chosen, visual, sparse yet descriptive and so evocative and honest that they have the effect of drawing the reader in, almost as if written with the intention of getting the reader involved in each moment that's captured.

This book has a compulsive quality about it. As usual with Martin's books, as soon as I get to the end I go straight back to the beginning and start again. In fact, I'm finding it very difficult to put this book down at all.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars House of Cards, November 4, 2008

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: In the Time of Assignments (Paperback)

I know Douglas Martin mostly through his prose writing, and among his many achievements are the two New Narrative masterworks OUTLINE OF MY LOVER and the collection THEY CHANGE THE SUBJECT. Now here comes a bumper crop of poems, I mean really a big old book! In it Martin exchanges the extraordinary concision of his prose style--so crisp, so lapidary--for a discursive, generous, even eccentric verse line. I guess there are two Doug Martins, that's what. Brandon Stosuy's blurb hails this style as "ëxpansive" and that's just the beginning.

I kept taking up this book and putting it down, because after every few pages my head was spinning with illuminations, as it does during a reading of Leaves of Grass, you just can't keep immersed in it, it will drown you. Luke Gerwe's innovative design splatters the front cover with discarded ID cards Martin kept as souvenirs--so there are at least ten Doug Martins that I can count, a telling comment on our current notion of "identity" as a costume to be picked up and discarded to suite one's convenience. These cards, however, also parallel the narrative the poetry unfolds inside, from a red state obscurity in which "all there seemed to be/ was the endless war on TV," to the present moment of nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, when we "saw what killing us coming," when "we were asking for it, with our whiteasses." The life of the poet climaxes in assorted revelations, not a few of them chilling, but a few moments of a magnificent redemption, one that could hardly have been predicted.