Carlos Martinez is the author of the chapbook An Unendurable Love, and has been published in a number of online and print magazines and anthologies. He teaches creative writing and literature at Western Washington University.

About The Cold Music of the Ocean:

"These poems are about relationships layered with depths of implication. Martinez brilliantly renders all, from the joyous to the disturbing, through imagery and music."
—James Bertolino

"The speaker in these delicately made poems is an Everyman in the middle of middle-age, a "city boy" trying to find a place to stand, a place to dance even, in a life full of misconnections. And dance, he does, in spite of "what time, predictably, has done." That's what I love about these sensitive poems: the way they transcend aging, transcend alienation to reach out for tenderness and for music."
—Patricia Fargnoli