Whole, Holy, Hot: Inside Chrissy Martin’s Debut Poetry Book
On March 17 Assistant Professor of English Dr. Chrissy Martin released her debut poetry book, Whole, Holy, Hot, and held her first reading at the Meadows Museum on the Centenary College campus. Dr. Martin’s readings were preceded by poetry readings from some of her creative writing students, seniors who had started at Centenary at the same time as Dr. Martin and will graduate this year.
Dr. Martin’s book started around 10 years ago during her Master of Fine Arts in poetry at Columbia College Chicago; during her program, she created what was supposed to be a publishable manuscript called “Ditch Daisies." The project was mostly about her father, who passed away when she was 19, but after revamping, revising, and sending poems out to publishers and contests, she came to a realization that “Ditch Daisies” was not her first book. Time had passed since she had written it and she had grown as a writer and poet, and she didn’t want her whole first book to be solely about grief.
During her doctorate program at Oklahoma State University, she had to do a similar project; this one she called “Redshift.” This is based on the astronomical concept of the same name, describing a doppler effect of light: objects shifting from red to blue depending on how far away they move. When in Chicago, Dr. Martin became more aware of how bodies can change to be more or less disabled depending on location, going from taking cars as a commute to having to stand on a train or walk when in a different city. This added another dimension of depth to her work, also connecting this concept to how the female body and sexism are different in one place than in another. Dr. Martin says that this work is about 75 percent of what makes up Whole, Holy, Hot.
During her first year as a professor at Centenary, she was able to get a first-year research award, which she used as a course release to have time to work on revising her work and to start to send it out to publishers again. She submitted to Write Bloody Publishing through a contest and they agreed to work with her. She was assigned an editor to help finish the book up. Since it contained over ten years of work, she had to revise some of her older work to fit her style now, saying that she has become a better writer technically; as a blanket statement, for her, good poetry is “precise, concise, and musical.” She has also now read enough poetry to become more comfortable with “ridiculous things and making jokes,” finally leaning into her own voice.
In her book, Dr. Martin has a poem with the running title of “When Mary From the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City Told Jen She Smelled Like Hospital,” a moment in the show that many people did not take seriously, instead seeing the moment as vain or shallow, as Jen Shaw justified the moment by saying she had to get her odor glands removed. Upon further research, as Dr. Martin says she “loves to take unserious things seriously,” she found that Shaw had a legitimate medical condition that she suffered medical trauma from. This poem works as a perfect example of Dr. Martin’s themes in her book, including pop culture, femininity, and disability, all things that people maybe do not take as seriously as they should, and all topics Dr. Martin wants to bring light upon with her work.
In her classes at Centenary and in her personal readings, Dr. Martin focuses a lot on poets that do not get a lot of time in the spotlight or are not typically included in the poetic “canon.” She covers works that are very female, very queer, and maybe “don’t always get time,” like disability, femininity, or mental health. She also focuses a lot on contemporary poetry that is currently being published in journals. Dr. Martin says that the field of poetry has now been completely “broken open,” and exclusionary ideas of what poetry can be have been so expanded that poetry is not just what you read in typical anthologies anymore. Dr. Martin hopes to give different topics that others might not appreciate enough time to shine. She hopes that her students are able to connect to poetry, knowing it is more than just Whitman or Keats and that “there is someone that you can find kinship with that is doing the weird work that you want to do in your writing.”
Whole, Holy, Hot is described as “a kaleidoscope of pop culture, gender performance, shifting geographies, religious control, medical systems, and violence both intimate and structural— alongside love gathered in doorways and kitchens and the wild light of humor, play, and magic.” It is available for purchase now and Dr. Martin will be doing readings for the book, with dates posted on her website, www.chrissymartinpoetry.com.