"For I am dyed in an ink that doesn't let me die."

In a fix of ink, Cecilia Martinez-Gil's second full-length collection of poems, life, death, and desire comingle on the page in passionate and innovative experimentations. In these fully ripe poems, poetry itself rules-it is the meeting place of beauty and intellect, of play and the imagination. Uruguayan poet Martinez-Gil, writing authoritatively and with great agility in her second language, offers hard-earned wisdom and insight in this book, ultimately inviting the reader to believe that " . . . we are desires transpired from thought to life." This is precisely the kind of revelation we most urgently need to hear, what we most need to have our poets fix in ink on the page. Brava, Cecilia!

--Gail Wronsky, author of So Quick Bright Things

"Reject the angel, give the muse a kick," said Lorca. "The true struggle is with the duende." So when a fix of ink begun as momentary fastening winds up feeling more like a permanent, pinching predicament, it's time to find a way "to gallop and gallop / in an unsaddled unreined flight." Jeremiad becomes journey as inner/outer fragments fly into fascinating, kaleidoscopic, finally blessed iterations. Volcanic, harrowing, painful, playful, full-bodied and also as delicately synesthetic as moments of "suspended lotus, / fluctuating water lilies," Cecilia Martinez-Gil's devastating second full-length first un-fixes on the way to that better, more generous, more commodious meaning of the verb: to mend, to heal, to put back together, as what has been corseted emerges when properly cosseted into "forgetting not / what's to be alive, / how to stay /alive."
--Sarah Maclay, author of Music for the Black Room

In this remarkable collection of poems, Cecilia Martinez-Gil deftly sketches the genome of human written expression, tracing our creative journey from ancient times to modern places. The cave walls of the past, the blank pages of the present and the digital bytes of the future are, like moth and flame, the siren calls of our imagination. Martinez-Gil artfully captures the eternal tension between void and the human need and desire to fill it, awarding us with a kind of dreamscape where touches of ink fix us in time and place: here, there, past, present, and future.

--David S Whitley, author of Cave Paintings and the Human Spirit

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