Dawn Lundy Martin’s third collection of poetry, Discipline, winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, is a haunting account of the ravages of political regimes on language and the body, recounted through mostly short prose poems, with sustained narrative threads of loss, disability, and danger throughout the book. In one poem, “Mothers warn against usual dangers. Men and the sun.” A sense of a threat, known and unknown, pervades these poems (“Everyday it happens or doesn’t happen,” or what is elsewhere referred to as “a confrontation with the opaque.”), as the speaker confronts disease, death of loved ones, ominous strangers, and racism. Martin examines here what kinds of bodies matter in our society, and, the more relevant question, which kinds of bodies don’t. Lyric moments that recall Sapphic fragments intermingle with narrative scenes, though even these are fragmented. These poems offer intimate glimpses into the stories that unfortunately don’t often get told. Even Martin writes, in the book’s “Coda,” “No one speaks of him, the dead, irrevocably unnamed.” There is an urgency underlying each sentence, and also a veil of secrecy; how do we tell these stories of pain? To whom can we even explain them? Boys come back to their old neighborhood, wounded from war. A man is dying of cancer; murder and illness abound. How are we to make sense of our bodies upon which we depend, which give us our pleasure, and yet, which also continually disappoint us. When we realize that our bodies and the bodies of our loved ones are the rejected in society, how does our relationship to those bodies then change? In these poems, the body is “safe enough,” and yet never actually in a place of safety. Fanny Howe’s foreword to the collection calls it “a return of the rejected person as a recognizable companion.” It is the so-called Other who confronts us on every page, yet each poem is also a mirror displaying how like ourselves these “strangers” actually are.