My Salvation Lateral is a collection of poems written between 2019 and 2023 in Brooklyn, New York. It is both joyful and desperate. While working on this book, the author, Emily Martin, engaged with two notions of dependence, which became intertwined. The first had to do with dependence in language: how the meaning of a word isn’t contained within the word itself, but is created in relation to other words, and changes through time in relation to historical context. The second had to do with social and interpersonal dependence: how much people need each other to survive, both materially and in terms of understanding ourselves and the world. These themes merge in the violence of retrospection in the process of writing: the idea that meaning or understanding can only be achieved later, after the fact.