In the Time of Assignments is a generous collection that showcases more than a decade’s worth of feeling and musing in the form of poetry. As the collection performs its own slow creep of structural irony, though, it also serves to undercut and critique, through realistic stocktaking, romantic idealism. The reader familiar with Martin’s work will find a repurposing and revelation of the foundations for his prior experiments in prose—Outline of My Lover, They Change the Subject, Branwell. Here fragmentary narrative takes foot in long, poetic sequences and angled interludes; lyric underpins almost everything. Telling it slant more often than not is telling it queer.

Martin’s poetry is a willfully penetrable one, which asserts as well its versatility. He develops his vision and meaning through sequence and series, as images, words, and concerns overlap and interlock. If he were a photographer, he would be playing with grains of exposure and documentation, though also leveling displays.

The work is divided into three sections, each given a geographical marker, indicating a point of the lyric-speaker’s evolving identity. These locations and conceptual frames lead to both the means and measures of elocution, in a style that can be witty, pining, playful, pissed, disappointed and hopeful; whenever possible, dead-end closure is deferred.

The felt smallness of a formative, working-class landscape colors the book’s first section, “Little Dramas from A Red State.” It is here that dreams of future escapes and escapades first arise. Though Martin has a poignant nostalgia for marking all informative geographies and bodies, loneliness keeps these poems on the move.

“In A College Town” goes on to attempt to widen the boundaries of the nuclear family plot with longer, sustained lyrical endeavors. Higher education provides the springboard into a larger world not necessarily roped in by those four walls one felt so inclined or compelled to leave behind. The theatrics here in nature are scripted through allusive schemes more sexually awake and attached. This section, as well as the final, proves a rich intertextual companion to Martin’s more autobiographically grounded prose works.

A belief in love dominates despite overwhelming odds and the potential crush of experience. A restless persistence in this life vision leads into the book’s last section and final conceptual amp: “I Move To New York to Become A Poet.” When face-to-face with the Great White Way, Martin charts what happens to the dear. The drama here, as all along, turns out to be one of partners, allegiances, schools, codings, name-dropping, evaluations of personal worth, and techniques for nourishment, both cultural and practical.

Douglas A. Martin was born in Virginia in 1973 and spent his childhood being raised in Georgia. In 1998, he moved from the South to New York, where he has taught writing at the New School for Social Research since 2001. Beginning as a poet and dramatist, Martin then moved to the novel form, and he has concentrated most of his creative energies here since his first full-length prose work Outline of My Lover. His writing remains a hybrid of sorts, informed by a love of the projects of Acker, Colette, Duras, Ernaux, Guibert, Handke, Leiris, and Nothomb; it has been anthologized in SLAM, Bend, Don't Shatter, Dangerous Families: Queer Writing On Surviving, Best Gay Erotica 2000, 2002, 2003, and Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative; and it has been adapted in part by the Ballett Frankfurt for their multimedia production “Kammer/Kammer.” He is currently a PHD Candidate in English Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he has written both critically and lyrically on aspects of Virginia Woolf, The Lost Boys, Sylvia Plath, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Arundhati Roy, pornography, Silvan Tomkins and Melanie Klein.