“It begins with an exhalation– ‘Calliope breathes/and this   air/fills the calliope’ and we’ve entered the raucous world of Strange Girls, filled with squawks and shrieks, blue tulle and pink feathers, burnt popcorn and gunpowder. DiMartino’s Strange Girls are circus women like DiMartino’s own Great-Aunt Josephine: snake charmers, bearded ladies, contortionists, sword swallowers, and more.  Each is drawn in precise, glittering detail through the poet’s swashbuckling use of various poetic forms.  Among the most impressive are her concrete poems, which spiral and skitter through the collection.  Every one of DiMartino’s sirens, sufferers, and spider-women in uniquely of her era, and of ours.  Strange Girls will endure.”

             –Leslie McGrath, author of Out from the Pleiades and Opulent Hunger, Opulent Rage 

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Sample Poems:

Sword Swallower
from a photo by Diane Arbus

The tawdry carnival tent’s dark canvas
serves as perfect outdoor
backdrop

where the Albino Woman indulges
the photographer with this simple, stunning
act; a salacious flair

for swallowing steel. The billowy cotton shirt,
the red skirt trimmed in gold ribbons and sequins
swept to the left side of her body

from a steady breeze, caught by the camera’s shutter.
She appears impaled by two swords:
a motionless

double cross, with arms outstretched,
head thrown back, thin silver blades and hilts
jutting from between her

parted lips. The tender curve of her throat
exposed to the lens like the white flesh of a sliced
ripened pear: open,      offered.

 

Spidora Rides the Spider

When she slips inside the cart
and the machine tilts as its legs rise into the air,
she gives herself over

to desperate drops and counter-clockwise turns.
She asks herself: what is a life
without the risk

of dangling

in air, a suspension with tremors
–of spinning, spinning–
from a filament

as fine as spun luck?
The hurdy-gurdy music churns
from the carnival performance stage,
encircles her

as the whirls whip with abandon,
and the orange lights that blink
the contour of the curved mechanical legs

blur against a night
webbed with stars, and she is happiest
when she lets go for the ride,

happiest, while she spins.