The Art of Floating is an elegant and beautifully crafted debut collection of poetry by Sudbury’s Melanie Marttila. Her poems are mirrors to the tiny, often quiet, and supposedly insignificant moments in a life. In her poetic work, Marttila reminds her readers to take note of the rhythms of the natural world, inviting them to consider elements of myth, astronomy, ritual, and personal anecdote as a way of finding the poems that live in the world in both a specific and universal way. Paying attention to the supposedly small things in life, Marttila suggests, is the way in which you can enter the world—and move through it mindfully—in a truly poetic fashion.

— Kim Fahner, author of Emptying the Ocean

Melanie Marttila practices a verbal form of “floating” in her poetry: a carefully poised meditative quietness of words, free of divisive polarities. She floats into both the cosmically vast and the allegedly small – vibrations of the Earth and conversations between leaves – sung together in an unbroken continuity or even unity. In tributes to animals, she balances their intelligence with ours, so we are conscious in a togetherness, not opposition. A suite of poems to the moon, written from a year’s lunar observations, floats self and moon together in a unity all their own. Marttila speaks to a wholeness in things in which we all are rooted.

— Roger Nash, author of 22 books, his latest poetry collection is World of Difference

In The Art of Floating, we are invited to soften to two interesting sensations at once: to float face-up on a fresh lake that fills our ears with its water, and to let the “lilting formations” of poetic sound pour into our listening. Over the five sections of this wonderful debut collection there is a wide ecology of sound-sparkling presences—“congregated” starlings and “their riotous dirge,” how “ravens caw, sacred/unexpected” while, indoors, “cat’s purr is a/white noise machine.” Marttila is a keen observer of the bustling natural activity of seasonal cycles that surround her, filling our senses with “the fullness of a scalloped moon” to a “scantily-clad tamarack” to playing the coldness of March lake ice off the San Andreas fault’s searing magma.

— Margaret Christakos author of 11 poetry collections including Dear Birch