Kids of the Black Hole

$16.00

Author: Marty Cain

Publisher: Trembling Pillow Press (2017)

“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

“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

“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

Poetry