The Catalog of Small Contentments

From associate professor of English to management trainer to retiree, Carolyn Martin has journeyed from New Jersey to Oregon to discover Douglas firs, months of rain, and dry summers. After years of writing academic papers and business books, she discovered that poetry is the way her mind interacts with the world-in images, rhythms, sounds, and intensities of language. So she's settled into the joyful challenge of translating experience into as few words as possible and making those experiences accessible to her readers.Martin prides herself on flashes of humor that light up her poems. Her intention is to begin and end poems with delight and throw in splashes of wisdom along the way. Add her penchant for musicality and obsession with unusual words, she crafts poems that are surprising and satisfying.Her poems have appeared in more than 130 journals and anthologies throughout North America, Australia, and the UK. Her fourth poetry collection, A Penchant for Masquerades, was released by Unsolicited Press in 2019, and her first chapbook, Nothing More to Lose, by The Poetry Box in January 2021.She currently serves as poetry editor of Kosmos Quarterly: journal for global transformation. Find out more at carolynmartinpoet.com.