A Grayscale Martyrdom

Alec Montalvo's debut echos between brutalism and the ethereal. A call to magic realism, set in New York City, these poems provide a haven for detached personas. The speakers squeeze themselves through the cracks of realism and emerge transformed as something fantastical. The collection opens with Three of Swords, the remains of an abandoned backyard wedding reduced to rubble, and then revitalized as a mystic ceremony. The title poem captures the experience of being dissociated at a house party and left in the throes of cabalism. A Grayscale Martyrdom is a collection of poems about gritty transformation, the effects of detachment and displacement along with the double function to reconstruct what was once internally dead into something holistically living.