"Other Legacies is a work of marvelous, necessary reclamation."
— Rick Barot, author of Moving the Bones —
Wesleyan University Press | November 17, 2026
Praise for Other Legacies

  • "Other Legacies is revelatory, presenting a few poets wholly new to me and several poems that have become instant favorites. As lovely and various as its poetry are its introductory essays. It shakes up a century of American poetics.”

    Evie Shockley, author of: Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry

  • “Every anthology proposes an argument, and the one made by Other Legacies is that American poetry is richer and deeper than the usual accounts of it. In one singular poet after another, we encounter voices of piercing solitude and social passion: as Tom Postell beautifully intones, “O give me a solid piece of sunlight and a yardstick / Of my own and the right to holler.” Complicating our story now, in our perilous times, Other Legacies is a work of marvelous, necessary reclamation.”

    Rick Barot, author of Moving the Bones

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"Residuum is spectacular and leaves me with a head encircled by stars."
— Heather Christle, author of Paper Crown —
Front Cover of Residuum, by Martin Rock. Image features a digital collage of an anatomy diagram of a man's musculature of the torso and a verdant, lush background of green leaves with vibrant red and orange flowers. Out of the man's head appears to be blooming a large flower with a hummingbird feeding at it.
Cleveland State University Poetry Center | April 2016
✸ Editor's Choice, First Book Prize
✸ 2016 Foreword INDIES Book Award Finalist
Reviewed at Harvard Review
Reviewed at Poetry Northwest
Reviewed at Poetry International
Praise for Residuum

  • "Martin Rock's remarkable debut collection, Residuum, takes on nothing less than making the unsayable (as Heidegger perceives it) "legible." I find the partial erasure form of this book dynamic, and lyrically fluid. Residuum is also moving, and genuinely funny in many spots. For all its critical engagement and thoughtfulness, it never loses the necessary, bodily pulse. Rock's is a wonderful new voice to encounter, a poet who takes from several different canons within our poetic tradition and makes something utterly his own from them."

    Erin Belieu, author of Come Hither Honeycomb

  • "In Residuum, Martin Rock creates the illusion of an enormous mind always in motion. "Meditating on the peak of a mountain last year / years ago // I held all the universe inside my skull," it informs us, suggesting both the intimacy and vastness of its vision. At times, these poems appear to live beyond the range of any individual, as if Emerson's Oversoul spoke directly to, and through, us--though just as quickly they become intimate and human, whispering softly into our ears. Always, Rock's observations, subtractions, and revisions fascinate, disrupting any clean, centered view of the world, replacing it with brilliant abstraction."

    Kevin Prufer, author of The Fears

  • "Martin Rock's Residuum spins language into twinned helices of what is said and what is taken back, layering micro- and macroscopic images of bodies in love and space and history. It might make you a little dizzy. It might be contagious or reproducing. It might ask you to glimpse at the moments when you try to speak truly and find your words coming out all infected and in debt. It is a love poem as Williams' Asphodel is a love poem. It is spectacular and leaves me with a head encircled by stars."

    Heather Christle, author of Paper Crown

  • "In our culture where composition largely resides between blinking cursors and revision is often an act of deletion, Martin Rock's impressive debut collection, Residuum, announces itself like a command to "Save." Language is not just the words that we use but everything that has been reconsidered, replaced, evolved, or ignored to get us here. These lyric compositions of image and additive subtraction are earned and owe as much to Robert Rauschenberg as they do Martin Heidegger. And because of that, Rock's collection is a visual and allusory opportunity for the reader: the word bank is open, the questions are asked, and the answers are here in poems that are both unexpected and fascinating."

    Adrian Matejka, author of Be Easy: New and Selected Poems

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"It's a stunning collection. One I look to for guidance in existence."
— Bianca Stone, author of The Near and Distant World —
Brooklyn Arts Press | 2013
✸ "Poetry Roundup: Great Books of 2013"
Reviewed at Smoking Carillion
Reviewed at TheThe Poetry
Praise for Dear Mark

  • "There's such calm beauty in Martin Rock's poems. The delicate pace allows us to look, listen, be present. But he'll lead you into this blissful state, look you straight in the eyes, and tell you "The butterfly's body is also a urinal cake / with antennae & legs braided into a rope." He's a philosopher and a soothsayer with a strange sense of humor. "Life is a kind of rust" in his poems. So he looks to the future life, and the past life. Indeed, the poems here are concerned with life--from the primordial soup, to "on the body of a spider / death's head." It's a stunning collection. One I look to for guidance in existence."

    Bianca Stone, author of The Near and Distant World

  • "Dear Mark is an unabashed open letter to Rothko's paintings that pushes past what the rest of us have thought of them. Martin Rock inhabits these paintings and the imagination in exciting and lyrical poems all springing from color and abstraction but ending in the strange and beautiful. Rock reminds us that art goes both ways, and it takes a talented viewer to see what's there."

    Matthew Rohrer, author of Army of Giants

  • "Mark Rothko's paintings have the aura of the sacred, the immanence of a revelation, the promise of a secret that is always just about to be disclosed. Martin Rock responds to Rothko's hushed eloquence with his own quick-hitting intimations of mortality, spiritual poems that deftly enter Rothko's visionary space, his intimate, anguished, violent, and fateful dramas."

    Edward Hirsch, author of The Living Fire

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