BOOKS
HONORARY MEN
Honorary Men is a journey through time, memory, culture, gender, and music from a poet, musician, and visual artist whose travels across India take her to unexpected places in her own history.
"...a complex work, juxtaposing its author’s own childhood memories with anecdotes about how she is perceived by strangers, by family, by colleagues. Adding another wrinkle to this is her background in music: the teacher who told her, 'You play like a man'; the musicians she interacts with on a trip to India. Honorary Men asks big questions, but comes at them in unpredictable ways, venturing into distinctive territory and forming a narrative few others could."
—TOBIAS CARROLL, THE ZINOPHILE, VOL. 1 BROOKLYN
"Nonfiction chapbook publisher GUILLOTINE has just made its newest offering, Honorary Men, available. A fascinating, incisive essay by Marisol Limon Martinez, the essay weaves together childhood musical escapes, gender politics, and travel in India for a thoughtful look at identity, and the way our environment gives shape to who we are and who we are perceived to be."
—LIBRAIRIE DRAWN & QUARTERLY BOOKS OF THE WEEK, MONTREAL
VIA DISSIMULATA
Via Dissimulata explores ideas of the body, family, gender, culture, and speech, how these extend beyond dichotomies into permeable layering of ideas. It integrates visual studies for a five-panel painting that includes the text of the entire poem with poetry that uses the space of the page as another canvas, by turns minimalist and expressionist.
Via Dissimulata tracks the tensions between the individual and the metaphysical, with poetry precise as it is harrowing, haunting as it is lovely.
"Via Dissimulata is a hauntingly beautiful collection of deep truths and abstract emotions. Be prepared to feel feelings. Take your time. Meditate on every word and image. Savor the experience. You’ll be grateful you did."
—HOLLY MIRANDA
“A journey in two media of expression, visual art and poetry, in two languages, English and Latin; Via Dissimulata complements Marisol Limon Martinez’s 2005 masterpiece After You, Dearest Language. In her work, Martinez is assembling a striking oeuvre before our eyes.”
—MICHAEL RUBY
FIRST SPACE, THEN STRUCTURES
First Space, Then Structures, a combination of allegory and speculative fiction, comprises one story told by four women. The recollections of the women, both disjointed and collective, take the reader back in time, to the very distant future, to varying psychological and geographical spaces including blissful ignorance, barren deserts, post-trauma breakdown, and futuristic cities filled with fragments of luminescent skyscrapers. The novella begins with a girl who plays piano in a glass elevator. First Space, Then Structures is part of a collaborative book series by visual artists and writers published by Nothing Moments Press.
AFTER YOU, DEAREST LANGUAGE
Conceived as a hypertext in book form, After You, Dearest Language is an alphabetical index of the author's dreams and visions.
"This linguistic navigation, much like Barthes by Barthes and Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Words, articulates one’s (often inarticulate, and yes, mysterious) interior and its relationship to exteriority."
—CLAUDIA MILIAN
"A subtle and beautifully-crafted exploration of a personal language… but clothed in song, clothed in the visionary power of poetry. Language as a method against evil … "
—GUILLERMO JUAN PARRA
"…Martinez's book works as both a dream index and an index of dreams. Martinez converts the associative impulse of the Surrealists to a literal cross-reference, a gesture which is also this book's unique contribution to the abecedarian trend…"
—JOYELLE MCSWEENEY, RAIN TAXI