"The Tempest is an impressionistic sketchbook, its verses experimenting across a wide expanse of forms to achieve the same goal: bearing witness to the truth. Martonfi has hewn her own spare lines to recast her book's obsession with the politics, violences, and musics of the oral. What draws the reader to this book of fractured tales is the vividness of the pieces and dedication to brevity, which loan to the strength of the poems' collective voice: different political conflicts, cultures, genders, ages, races speak to one shared human narrative. As we follow these survivors into their past and present lives, the poems emerge and they sing: the human soul endures in the poetry."--