"Heartbreaking, overstuffed, seeping with history, lonelier than imaginable and truly in-the-face of American culture, <em>Climbing Backs</em> debris-field of prose poems tries with all its heart to outrun cultural paradigms and ends up refining our spiritual ignorance till its our most gorgeous attribute."--from Jorie Grahams citation for the National Poetry Series. "Dionisio D. Martيnezs <em>Climbing Back</em> 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, <em>Organica</em>