According to Chicana poet and essayist, Ana Castillo, "The very act of self-definition is a rejection of colonization" (from Massacre of the Dreamers). In Heredities, his debut collection and winner of the Academy of American Poets' Walt Whitman Award, J. Michael Martinez seeks to explore this process of self-definition, both as a Chicano and as a poet.

In his work, Martinez displays such humility, honesty, and awareness of the blank page-the ability to document-as privilege, cultivating an American existence, simultaneously building up and stripping down the flood of narratives from which he was born: "The Chicano shapes identity like a an icicle fingering down from / the roof's edge" (from "Aporia").

Xicano son of the American Southwest, with ancestral ties spanning Mexico, New Mexico, Texas, this Colorado native transforms each page into a map, into a tool, into art, embodying the thorny and complex examination of the modern Chicano/a identity. Martinez leads the reader through historical, cultural, and familial investigation via the body of his foremothers, to the Spanish colonization of the Aztecs and the birth of the Mexican people, and back again as he ultimately is faced with his own fear of acting on his love for a woman of another race.

In "Heredities [1] Etymology," the first poem of the first section, Martinez establishes a solid home foundation from which to begin his exploration: five thick stanzas, lines broken only according to the limit of space. Martinez gives the eye a visually strong sense of order as he prepares for a rediscovering, a reevaluation of his history. The speaker begins with the naming of his mother according to his grandmother: In the poems of historical and cultural exploration, "White," "He Name Me Miklo," and "First Letter," "Second Letter," "Third Letter," (which contain actual text from Cortez's letters during the conquest) among others, the page becomes a map, as words are used as markers, documenting place upon the page, as well as the white space, the unexplored, wholly representing the daunting act of claim staking:
Moving between the narrative and the lyrical, each poem, each line, works within and without its neighbor as documentation of a journey through an uncompromising existence to the reclamation of the basic human desire. In an interview I recently conducted with the poet, Martinez says of this destination and its journey:
Martinez distorts the line between a slew of dichotomies as he works to establish the fallacy of naming. Martinez forces his reader to deconstruct prescribed identities, seamlessly synthesizing the many angles from which he approaches many types of colonization: of the mind, of the body, of the land.

In "Aporia," a series of seven prose poems that reads as a crown of sonnets, the speaker, "I," reevaluates a conversation with a heretofore unidentifiable "you," as they discuss the effects of colonization, naming, and language. The poet takes the kind of risks that prove his diligence, his commitment, and his need for autonomy, spreading these heavy stanzas across numerous pages both mapping and establishing a new foundation with the "you."
Using academic, scientific, and culturally common diction (a mix of Spanish and English), the poet blurs the boundaries between each and simultaneously exists in each sphere. He acknowledges that the human body is not a border, but a wholly identifiable Being. This extracting and accumulating works to separate the speaker's own distinct, although still exploratory, sense of self.

In "Articulations of Quetzalcoatl's Spine," and "The Sternum of Our Lady of Guadalupe," Martinez uses anatomical charts of various parts the human skeleton as epigraphs. Here again, the poet unwaveringly creates an amalgamation of two distinct entities, scientific and the spiritual, the corporeal and the cerebral, the traditional with the contemporary, moving one sect into the other, and thusly unlocking the doors of convention:
Much like one who deconstructs bombs, Martinez moves acutely and deliberately, disentangling centuries of hot-blooded savagery and oppression in many forms: caste systems, gender binaries, racial discrimination/expectation both within the Chicano/American paradigm as well as within American letters. He approaches this history as would an anthropologist, an archeologist, a researcher documenting the various bones and artifacts found during a dig deep in the ancient city of Tenochtitlan, then gloriously and generously uses the poetic to explore and analyze his findings into a revolutionary form of documentation.

Reminiscent of Chicano/a poets like Alberto Rios, Diana Garcia, and Gloria Anzaldua, Martinez defines for himself what it is to be a Chicano poet by redefining the self and the self's relation to documentation. This includes an exploration of language: what we inherit, what is given and what is expected, stripping away of generations to the origin of that which is inherited, and embracing the many and complex bloods that flow within the veins of the Chicano people. This is nothing short of forensic investigation: cold case reexamined for the sake of the identifiable self.
Cutting through convention and thus establishing himself a force of language, Martinez takes the kind of risks with his poetry that leave the serious reader voraciously seeking more and humbly awed by innovation, origin, self-awareness. This, of course, can be off-putting to the casual reader of poetry, as Martinez demands that his reader be fully present, ready and willing to investigate each line, each word to establish the necessary bridges between the formulation of history and the formulation of the self.

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