Heartbreaking, overstuffed, seeping with history, lonelier than imaginable and truly in-the-face of American culture, Climbing Back's debris-field of prose poems tries with all its heart to outrun cultural paradigms and ends up refining our spiritual ignorance till it's our most gorgeous attribute.-from Jorie Graham's citation for the National Poetry Series. Dionisio D. Martinez's Climbing Back is an epic-poetic-cinematic response to culture, a one-book shorthand to the 20th century and beyond, a series of responses to the world that are imaginative rather than reductive.-Susan Hussey, Organica