"A taught, tender collection of poems woven with sadness and loss dealing with aging, attachments, and the precarity of life. "Dawn Lundy Martin's poems read like a real-time excavation of what poetry can and can't do," writes Maggie Nelson. In Instructions for the Lovers, her most stripped down, direct work to date, Martin creates a poetic field dense with thought, image, and sound as she reflects on her relationship with her mother, experiences...