Chloe Martinez

Poet, translator, and scholar.

Chloe Martinez

Chloe Martinez

Chloe Martinez is a poet, a translator, and a scholar. She is the author of the poetry collection Ten Thousand Selves and the chapbook Corner Shrine, and co-editor, with Lisa Van Orman Hadley, of Chaos, Creativity, Completion: New Approaches to Writing and ADHD. She is the recipient of the NEA Fellowship in Literature and the Anne Frydman Prize for her translations of Mirabai. Martinez is the assistant editor of Beloit Poetry Journal and works at Claremont McKenna College.

cover of the book Blue Like My Beloved

Blue Like My Beloved

Poetry by Mirabai

Translated from Braj Bhasha by Chloe Martinez

Some people praise me, some talk trash. I just sing about god.

My road is the road where the saints walk, and I’m taking it.

—Mirabai

The sixteenth-century poet and saint Mirabai has long been an iconic figure in India. Tagore famously named his daughter after her and praised her as a figure of female liberation; Gandhi referenced her in speeches on nonviolence and anti-colonialism—her songs were sung in his ashrams. Today her poems continue to be sung by Bollywood singers, folk musicians, and ordinary people. In Blue Like My Beloved, the poet-translator and scholar Chloe Martinez—who spent decades studying, absorbing, and translating Mirabai’s work—has compiled a selection of Mirabai’s poetry that includes her greatest hits alongside lesser-known poems. The collection spans the range of Mirabai’s moods and themes in a vibrant poetry of intimacy and visionary perception that burns with a lasting brilliance akin to that of Rumi or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

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