“Forgotten Lands is a deeply personal excavation. It is a poetic journey of grief, womanhood, cultural memory, and spiritual survival. In a voice both sacred and searing, Lauren Martin braids Ifá cosmology with lived trauma, heartbreak, climate crisis, and ancestral longing.”—Peter Okonkwo, Literary Critic, PEL

“Raw, honest, and touched by the mystical, this collection inspires a higher sense of destiny. It attunes us to the rhythm of healing.”—Sallie Ann Glassman, Head Manbo Asogwe, La Source Ancienne Ounfo

“These poems don’t behave—and thank God. They detonate the polite conventions of contemporary poetry, holding grief, rage, sensuality, and ancestral memory all at once. This is poetry as spell craft: messy, mystical, and laced with a feral intimacy that cannot be tamed. Rarely have I read a work so unrepentant in its wisdom, so gloriously and heartbreakingly human.” —Sebastian Gutierrez, writer/director, JETT