Overview

Nothing More to Lose is an intense, hair-raising, and hopeful account of one family's resilience and faith. With poems based on Therese Kolbert Dieringer's autobiography (My Life - Lived and Remembered: A journey across Hungary, Germany, and America), Carolyn Martin tracks the Kolbert family as they escape from Hungary in 1944, endure seven years of starvation and sickness in Germany, and arrive to a new life in America in 1952. Refugees who know neither the language nor landscape, they finally find some semblance of peace in their new home. Martin knows her subject well. Dieringer is a family friend whose autobiography she edited in 2008. This intimate connection flows through powerful free verse poems that are filled with immediacy, insight, and compassion. Nothing More to Lose will open readers' hearts and minds to the challenges that refugees in every era experience. It will also affirm the power poetry has to bear witness to that suffering and to the strength lying deep within the human spirit. Thomas Merton wrote, 'We have all stood in front of that special image that sang to our soul.' Were he alive today and asked for an example, he would hand the person this chapbook. -Wayne-Daniel Berard, author of The Realm of Blessing In Nothing More to Lose, Carolyn Martin has read and written my soul. -Therese Kolbert Dieringer Dieringer's voice comes through each of Martin's poems showing how kindness and cruelty co-exist in us all, and how true strength and resilience cannot be extinguished. Most importantly, kindness wins. -Kathleen Cassen Mickelson, cofounder of Gyroscope Review

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9781948461788

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From associate professor of English to management trainer to retiree, Carolyn Martin is a lover of gardening and snorkeling, feral cats and backyard birds, writing and photography. After years of producing academic papers and business books, she discovered that poetry is the way her heart and mind interact with the world -in images, rhythms, sounds, and intensities of language. So she has settled into the joyful challenge of translating experience into as few words as possible. Martin's aesthetic is embodied in Jack Kerouac's comment in Dharma Bums: One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple, and in Sting's statement, All my life I have tried to find the truth and make it beautiful. Her poems attempt to use simple words to embrace truths wherever she finds them, and to turn them into something approximating the beautiful. Her poems have appeared in journals throughout North America, Australia, and the UK, and her fifth poetry collection, The Catalog of Small Contentments, will be released by The Poetry Box(R) in 2021. She is the book review editor for the Oregon Poetry Association and the poetry editor of Kosmos Quarterly: journal for global transformation.

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