Overview

Phillip Martin reflects on decades of professional and personal experience through the poems and songs in this collection. Martin currently serves as the chief film critic and a columnist for the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. In his journalistic career, Martin has been a sportswriter, a criminal investigator, a political columnist, a sports editor, the executive editor of an alternative weekly and a newspaper executive in charge of a small chain. Martin is also a songwriter (who appeared on the Merv Griffin Show in the '80s who has released two albums of original music, Gastonia (2013) and Euclid Avenue (2014). and was a finalist for the 2012 James Hearst Poetry Prize.

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Reviews

Philip Martin makes quick but deep incisions into the body cultural and politic of our nation. He is one of a handful of tough surgeons trying to resurrect this corpus in the middle-age days of our democracy. And he's funny. - Andrei Codrescu, commentator on National Public Radio's All Things Considered and founder of Exquisite Corpse. I've been reading Philip Martin since I was a teenager, and always with pleasure. A strong current of personal revelation has always run through his journalism---even the most outward-looking of his columns and reviews reveal a bold and insistent mind struggling to uncover itself---but in this volume he offers his most intimate work yet, and also his most lyrical, and some of his very best. Such poems as The Witnesses, Black Ice, and A Card from the Mick stand among my favorite things he's written. - Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of the Dead and The Illumination Writing about men and women often as lonely as God, Phillip Martin has given us a book to console our loneliness and notch up our awareness about what it means to be human. A seasoned poet, songwriter, and journalist, Martin is above all a mesmerizing storyteller, and in The President Next Door he ranges over an eclectic array of subjects, talking with us in non-pretentious, let-me-tell-you-a-story poems. Here are death and numbing violence, love, joy, baseball ( a church to which I belonged ), asides about Bill Clinton, conflicted accounts of family leavened by hopeless love, snippets of history, and hard, chilling confrontations with the past. We need this book, for it both damns and forgives: We are what we do/ and also what we might have done in this odd and wounded world. - Jo McDougall, author of The Woman in the Next Booth, Towns Facing Railroads and In the Home of the Famous Dead Martin's language is terse, tough, and often beautiful, as are his poems. Like many of Bob Dylan's early songs, these poems often arise from the daily news and transform these events into art. Baseball players are killed, dead bodies are observed, reverends are pistol-whipped, floods ravage, and movie stars call. The President Next Door is an ambitious and gripping collection of poems that will set you on edge more than once. - Marck L. Beggs, author of Catastrophic Chords and Libido Cafe Reading Philip Martin's collection is like listening to music, but his words are the notes. And like a good album, you play both sides in one sitting to get the full effect, or in this case, one nice afternoon's read. There are delta blues stomps, historical ballads, catchy ditties, mournful country hymns and ol' time rock and roll. His verses about the South taste authentic, peppered with characters we know and love, from our kinfolk to local heroes like Billy Bob Thornton, Miller Williams, Maya Angelou and a certain neighborhood fellow who once lived in the White House. Philip's noted journalistic background brings minutia and details to his poems, which make them bright and alive like a sharply picked mandolin. Listen with your eyes and enjoy. - Jay Russell, director of My Dog Skip, The Water Horse and Ladder 49 Philip Martin's distinctively varied voice engages the reader intellectually and viscerally in this collection of poems and song lyrics. His extraordinary gift, shown page after page, is the ability to capture the fugitive essence of any subject he approaches. Martin's precisely tuned and freshly turned phrases enlarge the reader's understanding of what has come before. His words touch something universal and true. -William B. Jones, Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History, 2nd Ed.

"Philip Martin makes quick but deep incisions into the body cultural and politic of our nation. He is one of a handful of tough surgeons trying to resurrect this corpus in the middle-age days of our democracy. And he's funny. - Andrei Codrescu, commentator on National Public Radio's All Things Considered and founder of Exquisite Corpse. I've been reading Philip Martin since I was a teenager, and always with pleasure. A strong current of personal revelation has always run through his journalism---even the most outward-looking of his columns and reviews reveal a bold and insistent mind struggling to uncover itself---but in this volume he offers his most intimate work yet, and also his most lyrical, and some of his very best. Such poems as ""The Witnesses,"" ""Black Ice,"" and ""A Card from the Mick"" stand among my favorite things he's written. - Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of the Dead and The Illumination Writing about men and women often as ""lonely as God,"" Phillip Martin has given us a book to console our loneliness and notch up our awareness about what it means to be human. A seasoned poet, songwriter, and journalist, Martin is above all a mesmerizing storyteller, and in The President Next Door he ranges over an eclectic array of subjects, talking with us in non-pretentious, let-me-tell-you-a-story poems. Here are death and numbing violence, love, joy, baseball (""a church to which I belonged""), asides about Bill Clinton, conflicted accounts of family leavened by hopeless love, snippets of history, and hard, chilling confrontations with the past. We need this book, for it both damns and forgives: ""We are what we do/ and also what we might have done"" in this ""odd and wounded world."" - Jo McDougall, author of The Woman in the Next Booth, Towns Facing Railroads and In the Home of the Famous Dead Martin's language is terse, tough, and often beautiful, as are his poems. Like many of Bob Dylan's early songs, these poems often arise from the daily news and transform these events into art. Baseball players are killed, dead bodies are observed, reverends are pistol-whipped, floods ravage, and movie stars call. The President Next Door is an ambitious and gripping collection of poems that will set you on edge more than once. - Marck L. Beggs, author of Catastrophic Chords and Libido Café Reading Philip Martin's collection is like listening to music, but his words are the notes. And like a good album, you play both sides in one sitting to get the full effect, or in this case, one nice afternoon's read. There are delta blues stomps, historical ballads, catchy ditties, mournful country hymns and ol' time rock and roll. His verses about the South taste authentic, peppered with characters we know and love, from our kinfolk to local heroes like Billy Bob Thornton, Miller Williams, Maya Angelou and a certain neighborhood fellow who once lived in the White House. Philip's noted journalistic background brings minutia and details to his poems, which make them bright and alive like a sharply picked mandolin. Listen with your eyes and enjoy. - Jay Russell, director of My Dog Skip, The Water Horse and Ladder 49 Philip Martin's distinctively varied voice engages the reader intellectually and viscerally in this collection of poems and song lyrics. His extraordinary gift, shown page after page, is the ability to capture the fugitive essence of any subject he approaches. Martin's precisely tuned and freshly turned phrases enlarge the reader's understanding of what has come before. His words touch something universal and true. -William B. Jones, Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History, 2nd Ed."

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