BOOKS

THE PRELUDE

Poetry; “dank, upsurgent pastoralia.” Available from Action Books and Small Press Distribution.

REVIEWS & PRESS:
Featured on The Poet’s Nightstand, Poetry Society of America
Interview in Rain Taxi, Winter 2023 (Print)
Listed in Dennis Cooper’s Favorite Poetry of 2023
Cleveland Review of Books
Co-interview with Joe Hall @ Jacket2
fck yr bookclub

A furious and sorrowful deep-dive together with Wordsworth through nature, into the pixels of the body, dreams, space, and matter. I feel blown away and grateful that such brutally excessive transformations are still possible. The Prelude is a brilliant and beautiful breakthrough. Marty Cain expands the world with the help of pure explosivity!
– Aase Berg

Poems of momentous and exhilarating beauty, I’m so attentive and awestruck. – Dennis Cooper

Let’s say the young radical Wordsworth wrote his autobiographical epic in a world of backyard skate ramps, Drano, ski shops & heroin deaths. Let’s say The Prelude, a poem Wordsworth described as “the ante-chapel” to “the Gothic church” of a never-completed “Philosophical poem,” was reborn as a recursive splatter of blood, or as a corpse opened to reveal a writhing screen of television static. For French Revolution read: overturned police truck. For the sublime read: panic attack, or LIVING IN THE CORPSE THAT FLOATS ON THE SURFACE. For poetry read: a utopia where we would all be inventors, innovating methods to keep our friends safe. Marty Cain writes against and through Wordsworth’s rural lyricism and toward the end of property, while also recognizing that in the cathedral of capital, the lyric is the rose window, the highest reach of our unliving conditions. the prelude is a frame, Cain writes. these were the fields assigned to me. These fields form a riotous subgarden, arrayed against the gardens and golf courses of power.
– MC Hyland

Culled from the beauty and roughage that was Wordsworth’s autobiographical energy, Marty Cain’s The Prelude is not unlike a darkened musical chalice that resonates with a form of psychic gore that arrays itself through a window where “the torrent of blood splatters the glass.” What resonates? An ironic poetic principle that haunts the hull of the text with psychological non-sequiturs.
– Will Alexander

THE WOUND IS (NOT) REAL: A MEMOIR

Hybrid poetry/nonfiction about trauma, memory, & messy corporeality. Available for purchase from Trembling Pillow Press and Amazon.

REVIEWS & PRESS:
Rob Mclennan @ Rob Mclennan’s Blog
Su Zi @ GAS: Poetry, Art and Music
Profiled @ Action Books Blog

What a dream, this new book by Marty Cain, and, like a dream, how difficult to shake: “one enters the wound and begins singing.” Here is Vermont as omphalos, scene of birth and the crime, site where bile, violence, blood, grief, and the dream are circuited towards and away from the boy-body. I admire the lyric intensity, the gorgeousness of this vision, in which literary tradition is interrogated, personal trauma distends the frameboards and the floorboards with its engorged veins, and beauty is a bolus that rises on the gorge of the throat. Disgorged, adorns the throat.
– Joyelle McSweeney

Marty Cain’s memoir defies—defiles—every convention of the genre: prosaicness, “straight” narrative, realism, a placid belief in Selfhood, and even the “non” of nonfiction. He digs, bloody-knuckled, through the rotting Arcadia of his boyhood and gets to the No of causation, the No of resolution, the No of time. A study of toxic masculinity as much as of vulnerability and violence, this book is tough as nails. Which is to say it is soft, and red, and brutal. It cuts to the quick.
– Aditi Machado

If Marty Cain’s new book, The Wound is (Not) Real: A Memoir, is, as its subtitle suggests, a memoir, it is a wounded memoir, a memoir of and in wounding. It begins with the facts of trauma, a body subject to injury, harassment, and assault. It is attentive to the materiality of this wounding, articulating it “as a condition of trauma and hegemonic oppression (i.e., we are wounded by the glassy fingers of the state).” But it also articulates an Arcadian alternative: the wound “as a space of ECSTATIC PERMEABILITY. Not violence, but contamination; not transcendence, but an orphic entry.” As the shimmering parenthetical in the book’s title suggests, the wound is—and is not—both of these things at once: violence and possibility. I love this book for the way that it sits with that contradiction: refusing both utopian longing and despair. In his rigorous attention to the ambivalence of wounding, Cain articulates an excess to the claustrophobic constraints of the memoir, preeminent genre of bourgeois subjectivity: “A POETICS WHERE PROPERTY DOESN’T EXIST / A POETICS FLOWERING FROM THE NARRATIVE WOUND.”
– Toby Altman

KIDS OF THE BLACK HOLE

Book-length poem about adolescence, punk rock, & southern Vermont. Available for purchase from Small Press Distribution and Amazon.

REVIEWS & PRESS:
Jessie Lynn McMains at @ The Poetry Question
Caroline Crew @ The Collagist
Claire Cronin @ Ghost Proposal
Evan Gray @ Tarpaulin Sky
Paul Cunningham @ The Fanzine
Nathan Livingston @ Take the L

If Holden Caulfield had acid-tripped on friendship and death in the aughts—if he’d then fallen through a therapy-hole to ride shotgun in a dark-energy jalopy—he might have dreamed this long, wild narrative lit up on uncertainty and sex. To steal a phrase from Cain: this poem has risen from the dead to eat lesser poems. It glows.
– Cathy Wagner

Inhabiting the space between elegy and prophecy, Marty Cain’s poem floats in a drowning country parallel to the United States of America. Where loss flickers at the edge of each frame, ‘the earth turns itself inside out’ like a teenager in a dreamscape, baptized in tears.
– Lucas de Lima

Marty Cain is a new galactic animal and Kids of the Black Hole is his apocalyptic Arcadian habitat, a place where body and landscape merge into electrified litany, where cultural and personal traumas are indexed with the speed and precision of revelation. This poem does not settle for childhood ghosts, prosaic lyric comforts, or Culturally Endorsed Normcore Platitudes As Plied By Many of Our Most Respected Poets. Rather, it presents a vision of white American adolescence that captures its inherent mind-fucking toxicity, its wonders (primeval and digitized), its collusion with empire and absurd consumption, its mad proscriptions that attempt to wreck the body and the spirit before the body has a chance to body and the spirit a chance to spirit. O skeletal radiance of punk rock futurity. O glyphs of mesmerism and molecular vocality. O inner trembling in the assemblage. Inside the hippodrome, a wolven ardor. Inside the belly of the beast, this motherfucker wants out. Marty Cain is one of the most brilliant and inventive young poets writing today.
– Tim Earley

FOUR ESSAYS

Hybrid nonfiction chapbook. Includes essays on epilepsy, poetics, sexual assault, and William Wordsworth. Available for purchase on the Tammy website.

REVIEWS & PRESS:
Profiled @ Tarpaulin Sky.
Profiled @ Heavy Feather Review.
Reviewed @ Rob Mclennan’s blog.

“Marty Cain can write a damn sentence. I mean: he can write one hell of a sentence. And you can enter that underworld. And I hope you do. Another way of saying: he can cast a field in which illegibility and truth conjunct, and in so doing, broadcast the multiply-rooted blooming wound of being a body. These essays are dazzling and acute. Did you know a body can hold a sigh for decades before releasing it? This collection knows. This collection teaches.”
– Selah Saterstrom