Naoko Fujimoto reviews
Corner Shrine
by Chloe Martinez

An occult mirage still veils each city, I thought, when I spent time in India. This thought returned while reading Martinez’s poem, “Leaving India, Before the Monsoon.”

…blue glass bangles
worn to the supermarket back home can contain
jostling crowds at dusk, reams of Banarasi silk skies
shaken out, rippling red-to-pink-to-gold, the steps that descend, 
golden sandstone, into water.

Corner Shrine is a travel memoir based on Martinez’s experiences living in India. Through her poems, we visit archeological sites and ancient cities such as Mehrangarh Fort (Jodhpur), Taj Mahal (Agra), and Delhi’s streets. 

Jodhpur is known as the blue city. Mehrangarh Fort rises above small buildings painted blue, some peeling into different shades. From the fort, it looks like rippling water. Martinez’s book cover captures the exact color. “Don’t tell it like a story. It will sound too beautiful,” warns the speaker in the first poem, “The Mirror Room, Mehrangarh Fort.” And the journey begins.

After I fell from the moving train—the door
open, someone falling against me and then

my own fall, out of the door and onto the concrete 
platform of Mathura Junction Station—I landed

hard, breaking my jaw and several teeth, the
crunch sounding inside my head, a sound

I can never forget. 

                                                                        “Learning Experience”

I imagine the broken tooth rooting between the rails; and perhaps, branching out. The speaker notices the crisp blue sky but also learns that to be fully alive, life sometimes has to knock you down. “[Y]ou in a cloud of parakeets forget about death.” So does the speaker who survives this passage only to realize that clicking your heels isn’t the only way to return to self, to home.

Chloe Martinez‘s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in publications including Waxwing, Prairie Schooner, The Collagist, [PANK], and The Common. She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a finalist for the 2019 Sustainable Arts Fellowship, and a poetry book reviewer for RHINO. She holds degrees from Barnard College, Boston University, UC Santa Barbara, and the MFA for Writers at Warren Wilson College, where she was a Holden Fellow. She is the Program Coordinator for the Center for Writing and Public Discourse at Claremont McKenna College, as well as Lecturer in Religious Studies. www.chloeAVmartinez.com. 

Naoko Fujimoto was born and raised in Nagoya, Japan. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in POETRY, Kenyon Review, Crazyhorse, Seattle Review, Quarterly West, North American Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Prairie Schooner, and many more. She is the author of Glyph:Graphic Poetry=Trans. Sensory (Tupelo Press, 2021), Where I Was Born(Willow Publishing, 2019), and three chapbooks. She is an associate & outreach translation editor at RHINO Poetry.