In M.L. Martin’s surrealist series, the desert is stage, actor, scene, and symbol. Musical syntax delight and beckon, syncopating with the undulating heat waves from distant mirages. The prose poems speak to the haunted life among the ocotillo and the palo verde with images depicting the sharp horizon, populating the empty spaces of the Sonoran Desert with strange finery. Martin’s ekphrastic meditations are equal parts sublime and sonorous. — Oliver de la Paz