A ‘career apex’ poet whose natural home is at once on the margins and at the heart of the hybrid, Eilish Martin’s practice in ! All'arme / ? And what... if not is at once experimental, interdisciplinary and intercultural.

In content and visionary concept, the poetries published in this tête-bêche (head-to-toe) double book brings together lyrical fragmentation and narrative drive, language play, intertextual dialogue and textual innovation with unsettling anxieties and deep care for public and private worlds.

The 96-page collection catalogues some small part of what Martin herself has referred to as the ‘compulsive journey’ of her poetry-making and verbal-visual improvisations across the past ten years.

Eilish Martin has published two previous collections of poetry, slitting the tongues of jackdaws (Summer Palace Press, 1999) and Ups Bounce Dash (Summer Palace Press, 2008). Her work has appeared in national and international journals and anthologies including Word of Mouth: Slovo iz Ust (St. Petersburg, 2004) The White Page/ An Bhileog Bhán; Twentieth Century Irish Women Poets (Salmon, 1999) Stinging Fly, HU, Artwords, Artslink, Cyphers and The Sunday Tribune. She has contributed translations to Seán Ó Ríordáin’s Selected Poems, edited by Frank Sewell (Yale University Press, 2014), and When the Neva Rushes Backwards, a bilingual anthology of work by five Russian poets compiled and translated by Word of Mouth Collective (Lagan Press, 2014).

In 2023, her poem ‘Paradise Fatigue’, featured in ‘Passerine Nights’, a musical composition by Ian Wilson for soprano and ensemble.