<div>Scrutinizing myth, culture, identity, and sexuality, J. Michael Martinez, in his brave new collection, weds the innovative with the narrative tradition, cultivating a collection that is unlike any other, simultaneously drawing together and pulling apart the familiar and the foreign, the self and the other, the known and the unknowable, the recoverable and irrecoverable past, the historical record and all that is given up for lost. Martinez interrogates the restrictions chosen to constrain imagination’s boundlessness.</div>