<p><strong>From the universal to the personal, the formal to the experimental, Carolyn Martin&rsquo;s fourth poetry collection, <em>A Penchant for Masquerades</em>, takes an unflinching look at the fluidity of truth, time, identity, history, death, and relationships.</strong></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><strong>Martin time-travels with Neanderthals, Lucy, and Big Foot to 9/11 to the future collapse of a holographic universe. She mines scientific discoveries, nursery rhymes, biblical characters, and the works of Issa, Horace, Yeats, Frost, Williams, Szymborska, and Collins in poems that are both playful and thought-provoking.</strong></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><strong>Since she believes reincarnation is a distinct possibility, she suggests that death need not be taken too seriously (&ldquo;Re-Entry Interview,&rdquo; &ldquo;A Case for Sudden Death&rdquo;). She riffs on an Issa haiku (&ldquo;Thoughts on a Translation&rdquo;), sits down to dinner with Horace (&ldquo;Notes from a Water Drinker&rdquo;), and promises literary revenge on a reviewer who negatively critiques this collection (&ldquo;To the Reviewer Who Missed Too Much&rdquo;).</strong></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><strong>Martin&rsquo;s forms run the gamut from sonnets, haiku, and pantoums to free verse, found poetry, and paratactic poems whose stanzas can be read in any order. A lover of language, she builds poems based on one word &nbsp;(&ldquo;Phonaethetics,&rdquo; &ldquo;Disambiguation,&rdquo; &ldquo;Stirring&rdquo;), and delights in re-stitching the words of others in surprising ways (&ldquo;Variations on Final Words,&rdquo; &ldquo;10 Variations on the 50 Most Quoted Lines of Poetry,&rdquo; &ldquo;90+ Titles Appropriated from Poetry 180 Hosted by Billy Collins&rdquo;).</strong></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><strong>A lover of all things poetic, Martin has created an eclectic collection for readers who have a penchant for words and who are open to believing in everything and nothing.</strong></p>