Forgotten Lands - Poems of the Ancestors

In the tradition of Joy Harjo and Sandra Cisneros, Forgotten Lands is a fearless poetry collection exploring disability, divinity, and erasure—offering a voice from the margins that refuses to be silenced.

After her acclaimed debut, psychotherapist and poet Lauren Martin returns with a luminous second collection written from a life changed by spinal cord injury. From the quiet of recovery, she turns to ritual, prayer, and language.

Rooted in the West African tradition of Ifá, and honoring the Òrìsà who walk with her, these poems move through love and loss, illness and the body, isolation and faith, and the daily politics of being overlooked.

With a voice both melodic and raw, Martin shifts between verse, haiku, and prose poems. She writes toward nature, toward God’s presence in all forms, and toward the fierce tenderness that survives transformation.

Forgotten Lands is poetry as prayer and protest—an offering what endures when everything else shifts.