In the Time of Assignments is a generous collection that showcases more than a decade's worth of feeling and musing in the form of poetry. As the collection performs its own slow creep of structural irony, though, it also serves to undercut and critique, through realistic stocktaking, romantic idealism. The reader familiar with Martin's work will find a repurposing and revelation of the foundations for his prior experiments in prose - Outline of My Lover, They Change the Subject, Branwell. Here fragmentary narrative takes foot in long, poetic sequences and angled interludes; lyric underpins almost everything. Telling it slant more often than not is telling it queer. Martin's poetry is a willfully penetrable one, which asserts as well its versatility. He develops his vision and meaning through sequence and series, as images, words, and concerns overlap and interlock. If he were a photographer, he would be playing with grains of exposure and documentation, though also leveling displays.

The work is divided into three sections, each given a geographical marker, indicating a point of the lyric-speaker's evolving identity. These locations and conceptual frames lead to both the means and measures of elocution, in a style that can be witty, pining, playful, pissed, disappointed and hopeful; whenever possible, dead-end closure is deferred. The felt smallness of a formative, working-class landscape colors the book's first section, ''little Dramas from A Red State.'' It is here that dreams of future escapes and escapades first arise. Though Martin has a poignant nostalgia for marking all informative geographies and bodies, loneliness keeps these poems on the move. ''In A College Town'' goes on to attempt to widen the boundaries of the nuclear family plot with longer, sustained lyrical endeavors. Higher education provides the springboard into a larger world not necessarily roped in by those four walls one felt so inclined or compelled to leave behind. The theatrics here in nature are scripted through allusive schemes more sexually awake and attached.

This section, as well as the final, proves a rich intertextual companion to Martin's more autobiographically grounded prose works. A belief in love dominates despite overwhelming odds and the potential crush of experience. A restless persistence in this life vision leads into the book's last section and final conceptual amp; ''I Move To New York to Become A Poet.'' When face-to-face with the Great White Way, Martin charts what happens to the dear. The drama here, as all along, turns out to be one of partners, allegiances, schools, codings, name-dropping, evaluations of personal worth, and techniques for nourishment, both cultural and practical.