Ten Thousand Selves - Paperback

Ten Thousand Selves explores identity as refracted through family, religion, and place, and situates us in the midst of life's messiness. Drawing on the Tibetan mandala, Mughal memoirs, visual art, online shopping reviews, and a series of text messages from strangers, these poems meditate on gender, power, and motherhood, asking who, in all our multiplicity, we are, and who we might become. The book's far-traveling eye allows Martinez to wade the many rivers we cannot enter more than once-because of change. But change is also the hero of the book as cultures evolve, wounds heal, and our questions reshape our sense of what is possible, what is good.