In her sixth full-length collection, Martha Deborah Hall explores the shifting lights and shadows that fall on a woman in her so-called golden years, offering us a voice that sweeps the full register from sassy to gritty to tender. In elegant free verse and stunning twists on traditional forms, she gives us a darkly shining world, deftly measuring out "the weight of light"--and life.
-- Kate Gleason, Author of Measuring the Dark and Reading Darwin While My Father Dies, Director of Writers Submit

Martha Deborah Hall's Weight of Light is playful, vibrant--both witty and poignant. With a brash, bold, invincible voice, her poems explode off the page in celebrations of living. While the poems abound in the sheer joy of physical existence, the presence of time and death renders them deeply human, universal."
-- Candace Bergstrom, Poet and Teacher living in the woods of New Hampshire

Martha Hall has outlined her mission in life to live strong and expects others to do likewise. In her poems she advances a new model for deliberate and conscious aging where action is the key. Her poems are thought-provoking, striking, and sometimes surprising. She crisscrosses class and generational divides, sometimes offering caustic, hard line opinions while at others, heartwarming gestures of a giving self. Weight of Light is a collection of intimate, powerful, and inspiring poetry. We witness the author learn to define herself, find her own path, her own voice. It's a rewarding read.
-- Beverly Melle, Educator and Recent Friends of the Amherst Library Artist of the Month Exhibitor

Cover Art: Pigeon Point Lighthouse by Linnea Gershenberg

Martha Deborah Hall goes through the major decades of her life and transforms singular moments into images and lines that speak with a voice that is raw, spare, luminous. She holds the mirror of reflection up to us as we see what we have overlooked as she expresses her innermost feelings on love, faith, life, artful living, mortality and self-actualization as daughter, wife, mother, friend, artist and independent woman. As the years pass, she chooses to leave behind the messy, burned parts, the disappointments, the unloved parts, the betrayals, and instead embraces the strength, hope and joy that brings peace and purpose to the very essence of the self.
--Diana Lathrop-Bouchard, Rise Member, Rivier College

In her fifth full-length collection, Martha Deborah Hall explores the gifts and vagaries of aging in a voice that is both arresting and as clear as a vinegar-scrubbed window through which she shows us slices of the human condition with poignancy, humor, and a hard-earned gravitas. An astute observer of contemporary life - both inside and out - she offers poems that sparkle with fresh imagery, well-placed turns of phrase, and a deftly-crafted music that never loses the clean edge of ordinary speech. From her compelling free verse to her dazzling use of traditional forms, she asks the vital question of the later stage of life: "As we achieve our sunset / and head toward silver dust / what will be our testimony?" - and answers it in kind. A must-read
--Kate Gleason, author of Measuring the Dark (selected by Phillis Levin as the winner of the First Book Award at Zone 3 Press) and director of Writers Submit, an editing and literary submitting service

In Heading Toward Silver Dust, the fifth expose in the life of Martha Deborah Hall, she travels through middle age and beyond, staring down the questions we are afraid to ask. Reflecting upon regrets, angry seas, poignant memories, she resolves to continue along the uncharted road, pondering, "Whose engine will my leftover car keys start?" With a zest for life, humorous insight, and tangled emotions, Hall steers down the path of the human experience, with tender hands and the grace of a seasoned poet.
--Jane Gilman, author of Sunset, and Renewal, has accompanied Hall, on much of her journey, as the co-facilitator of Poets Unbound.

Cover art: Kathleen Andrews Memorial Bench
photograph by Martha Deborah Hall

The author writes evocative, succinct, graphic poems portraying the lives of five women who survived great hardship. Through carefully crafted persona prose poetry, Hall captures the anguish of these women who despite their tumultuous childhoods achieved prominence. Hall's bountiful reservoir of metaphor is unmatched.
- Helen Jackman
Each poem reflects change and transition as the women selected for this book of poetry face the obstacles and the triumphs of their lives. Hall offers a unique perspective as she unravels the universal angst that propels the creative spirit. These women are the stuff of legend, yet Hall exposes their vulnerablility with care and empathy.
- Beverly Melle
Martha Deborah Hall clearly understands conflict, loss, abandonment and survival. Often simple, always concise, "Inside Out" stirs intense emotion to the core of your soul. With flashes of revelation Martha Deborah Hall takes you exactly where she wants; to the in-depth understanding you would never expect of five very accomplished women.
- Rita Ralston

In her commanding second full-length collection, Martha Deborah Hall offers readers more of what they have come to love about her poetry: elegant craft, precise detail, concise language and considerable emotion. These poems are concerned with the every day, with the acutely experienced moments that make up a full life, replete with joys and grief. Here "red leaves checker lawns," "a snowplow clangs it's iron song," "lipstick's smeared from so-longs," and "a first dahlia beats through the soil." When you visit My Side of the Street arrive hungry because you'll be treated to a feast of "leftover turkey for supper," "pizza-cake," "purple ice cream," and Hall's thoroughly nourishing verse.
Lana Hechtman Ayers, publisher, Concrete Wolf Poetry Chapbook Series
This is the writing of the completely engaged observer. She has seen life in its vivid splendor, its savage malice, its occasional grace as well as in the unsung everyday reality we all share. . . . Losses have been suffered and grieved, gains applauded and savored. Hall knows that life itself is inherently unfair, and has accepted it. . . . Hall has found wisdom and some of that wisdom is shared here. It is shared by a confident poet who has managed to express those moments, both the bitter and the splendid as well as those moments in between with an exceptional lack of artifice - no makeup here. Not even a slick of lip gloss.
Hall is for real, and I can think of no higher praise.
Frances LeMoine, writer, editor, publisher
The poignancy here is palpable and compelling.
Ottone M. Riccio, author of The Intimate Art of Writing Poetry

Martha Deborah Hall's Two Grains In Time is a journey from innocence through loss toward wisdom. These are poems of careful observation. The voice is direct, intimate, certain. The title poem refers to the narrator's identical twin sister and closest companion who predeceased her, but who she knows will be waiting for her at the end of her life with "a cup of tea in hand." All of the senses are sumptuously attended to in this rich first collection by a poet of mature sensibilities. Two Grains In Time is a poetry collection well worth all your time.
Lana Hechtman Ayers, Publisher, Concrete Wolf Poetry Chapbook Series
If for Stephen Spender the eye is a "delicate wanderer, / Drinker of horizon's fluid line," the eye in Martha Deborah Hall's poems drinks its fill in more intimate territory, closer to home, closer to the proverbial bone. Before a child on a swing embarks on her adventure, she notices that her father had set "galvanized bolts into the apple tree." When she comes back down to earth, the "Knots under the sides of the cherry plank seat" have kept their sturdy tension. As this collection swings through the arc of tragedies and harmonies of a life, Hall's ever-vigilant eye reconnoiters a misfit yet glorious world full of sometimes troubling and very nearly always gratifying surprises.
Tom Daley, Poetry Instructor, Boston Center for Adult Education
Seldom does one find a poet who explores the complexities of life events with such directness, while maintaining that twist of poetic whim. Both the courageous honesty, and the willingness to proceed through simple pathways to profound discernment, draw the reader into the accessible, and somehow familiar, world. I find Two Grains In Time to be an extremely enjoyable journey, landscaped with the intrinsic cleansing quality of truth.
Jerri Hardesty, Publishing Editor, New Dawn Unlimited, Inc. Publications