Contributors

Valerie Martin
Contributor History

Biography
Valerie Martin
Valerie Martin’s most recent novel is The Ghost of the Mary Celeste (Vintage). She is also the author of three collections of short fiction, a biography of St. Francis of Assisi, and nine other novels, including Mary Reilly (winner of the 1990 Kafka prize and the basis for the Stephen Frears film of the same title), Property (2003 winner of Great Britain’s prestigious Orange Prize), and most recently The Confessions of Edward Day. This is her first online publication.

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In Print

Vol. 80
Ways of Water
Spring 2023
Edited by Bradford Morrow

Online

September 20, 2023
The Rachel stands tuned  
            to multiplicities, 
aslant in a territory of longing,
            where she becomes foreign.

            What has she found?
She listens, acknowledges another sound,
            diffuse, multiple,  
pulsing thought, oscillations, whisperings,
            never only one.
September 13, 2023
I had yet to discover the source of that star, it came and it passed but from where it sprang and then fell to fading remained a mystery. In cycling its light lent its powers to coloring my tablecloth a lighter shade, relieving pigment from its duty to darken, except for those spots where I placed my bottles and cups, shielding only parts of the piece from fading, threads left closer to their original hues hewed to others abandoned as wraiths to their fates, a darker ring the mark of those who stayed behind.
September 6, 2023
Where the trees blackened, I saw,

Quickly, three deer lean into goldenness.

It seems, although wildfires rage

Out of control, this world remembers

Some portion of its first purposes:

Superfluous beauty