My Salvation Lateral
ByPublisher Description
My Salvation Lateral is a collection of poems written between 2019 and 2023 in Brooklyn, New York. It is both joyful and desperate. While working on this book, the author, Emily Martin, engaged with two notions of dependence, which became intertwined. The first had to do with dependence in language: how the meaning of a word isn’t contained within the word itself, but is created in relation to other words, and changes through time in relation to historical context. The second had to do with social and interpersonal dependence: how much people need each other to survive, both materially and in terms of understanding ourselves and the world. These themes merge in the violence of retrospection in the process of writing: the idea that meaning or understanding can only be achieved later, after the fact.
Download the free Fable app

Stay organized
Keep track of what you’re reading, what you’ve finished, and what’s next.
Build a better TBR
Swipe, skip, and save with our smart list-building tool
Rate and review
Share your take with other readers with half stars, emojis, and tags
Curate your feed
Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesNo Reviews
About Emily Martin
Emily Martin is a writer and teacher in, and from Brooklyn. She is most recently the author of My Salvation Lateral (The Elephants, 2024), Marking a Salt Ridge (Erotoplasty Editions, 2023), and the chapbook Dependence, the Joistrix / How you are made (Hiding Press, 2023). More of her work is at myemilymartin.com
Other books by Emily Martin
Start a Book Club
Start a public or private book club with this book on the Fable app today!FAQ
Do I have to buy the ebook to participate in a book club?
Why can’t I buy the ebook on the app?
How is Fable’s reader different from Kindle?
Do you sell physical books too?
Are book clubs free to join on Fable?
How do I start a book club with this book on Fable?