A Grayscale Martyrdom by Alec Montalvo

“I love the nocturnal mind that navigates the spaces of the poem in which dark clouds comb the sky as lost lovers crawl through broken glass. Montalvo’s A Grayscale Martyrdom is a sinister delight, full of moody humor and keen observations, with images so fresh they’ll stop you in your tracks.”

–Cate Marvin

Opening in apocalyptic aftermath, where an unnamed speaker has just “finished the dig / in the yard / on [his] hands and knees,” Alec Montalvo’s A Grayscale Martyrdom is a strenuous personal and psychological excavation, a self-performed post-mortem of a speaker whose identity and relationships seem always on the verge of disintegration. Yet elusive as this speaker may be, Montalvo makes sure to anchor us in the particulars of his urban environment–unafraid to get his hands dirty, he sifts through grime and gray, looking for some scrap of mysticism or the ephemeral connection one might feel seeing “marijuana passed like a laundry line / between the scattered party dwellers.” Putting a gritty twist on the flaneur poet tradition, Montalvo stalks the city looking to project his consciousness onto what surrounds him, screwdriving embankment mirrors “in skull for a new set of eyes” or hijacking the wind’s perspective to see himself “coming down like something heavenly, crashing / through the clouds,….” With a precise diction, rhapsodous lyrical passages, and stanzaic forms that are inventive and deftly honed, this is a book that poetry readers will love as much for its craft as its personal revelations. These poems will help you contend with those “reanimated bones” you thought were long buried, they will present you with novel vantage points for seeing your past, and reveal beauty in a landscape of bodegas and vampirites.

–Anthony Borruso, poetry editor of the Southeast Review

“With these poems, Alec Montalvo braids the lonely echoes of modern life with ethereal beauty and meaning. Precise and elemental, this collection leaps from the page with resonant experiences of dislocation and yearning. ‘The mind is a wreck of a junkyard/ and the static between radio stations.’ A collection you’ll remember long after your first and second readings.”

–Melanie Faith, author of From Promising to Published: A Multi-Genre, Insider’s Guide to the Publication Process, https://www.melaniedfaith.com/