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Published by She Writes Press
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
Table of Contents
About The Book
In the tradition of Joy Harjo and Sandra Cisneros, Forgotten Lands is a fearless poetry collection exploring disability, divinity, and erasure—offering a voice from the margins that refuses to be silence.
After her acclaimed debut, psychotherapist and poet Lauren Martin returns with a luminous second collection written from a life changed by spinal cord injury. From the quiet of recovery, she turns to ritual, prayer, and language.
Rooted in the West African tradition of Ifá, and honoring the Òrìsà who walk with her, these poems move through love and loss, illness and the body, isolation and faith, and the daily politics of being overlooked.
With a voice both melodic and raw, Martin shifts between verse, haiku, and prose poems. She writes toward nature, toward God’s presence in all forms, and toward the fierce tenderness that survives transformation.
Forgotten Lands is poetry as prayer and protest—an offering what endures when everything else shifts.
After her acclaimed debut, psychotherapist and poet Lauren Martin returns with a luminous second collection written from a life changed by spinal cord injury. From the quiet of recovery, she turns to ritual, prayer, and language.
Rooted in the West African tradition of Ifá, and honoring the Òrìsà who walk with her, these poems move through love and loss, illness and the body, isolation and faith, and the daily politics of being overlooked.
With a voice both melodic and raw, Martin shifts between verse, haiku, and prose poems. She writes toward nature, toward God’s presence in all forms, and toward the fierce tenderness that survives transformation.
Forgotten Lands is poetry as prayer and protest—an offering what endures when everything else shifts.
Product Details
- Publisher: She Writes Press (December 8, 2026)
- Length: 256 pages
- ISBN13: 9798896362210
Raves and Reviews
“Forgotten Lands is a deeply personal excavation. It is a poetic journey of grief, womanhood, cultural memory, and spiritual survival. In a voice both sacred and searing, Lauren Martin braids Ifá cosmology with lived trauma, heartbreak, climate crisis, and ancestral longing.”—Peter Okonkwo, Literary Critic, PEL
“Raw, honest, and touched by the mystical, this collection inspires a higher sense of destiny. It attunes us to the rhythm of healing.”—Sallie Ann Glassman, Head Manbo Asogwe, La Source Ancienne Ounfo
“These poems don’t behave—and thank God. They detonate the polite conventions of contemporary poetry, holding grief, rage, sensuality, and ancestral memory all at once. This is poetry as spell craft: messy, mystical, and laced with a feral intimacy that cannot be tamed. Rarely have I read a work so unrepentant in its wisdom, so gloriously and heartbreakingly human.” —Sebastian Gutierrez, writer/director, JETT
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Book Cover Image (jpg): Forgotten Lands
eBook 9798896362210
