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Things to Do in Hell
Join Chris Martin for a poetic walking tour of hell—or is it heaven? In this wickedly clever collection, Martin asks how we go about living in the tension between protesting lunatic politicians and picking up the kids from school, mourning a dying Earth and making soup, combating white supremacy and loving our dear ones. Martin’s poems pick at the tender scabs protecting our national and individual identities, and call for more honest healing. Things to Do in Hell channels 2016 anger into 2020 action with sophisticated, rhythmic verse that compels us to beat our swords into ploughshares and join the fight.
- GenresPoetry
112 pages, Paperback
Published October 6, 2020
2 people are currently reading
58 people want to read
About the author
Chris Martin
47 books29 followersChris Martin is this very moment endeavoring to become himself, a somemany and tilted thinking animal who sways, hags, loves, trees, lights, listens, and arrives. He is a poet who teaches and learns in mutual measure, as the connective hub of Unrestricted Interest/TILT and the curator of Multiverse, a series of neurodivergent writing from Milkweed Editions. His most recent book of poems is Things to Do in Hell (Coffee House, 2020) and his first book of nonfiction is May Tomorrow Be Awake: On Poetry, Autism, and Our Neurodiverse Future (HarperOne, 2022). He lives on the edge of Bde Maka Ska in Minneapolis, among the mulberries and burr oaks, with Mary Austin Speaker and their two bewildering creatures.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
August 5, 2020
Difficult for me to assess properly as the book seems to rely on graphic layouts that don't come through on my Kindle. While the material was evocative, I could not gauge the effectiveness of the material due to my difficulties in reading the text as it came through my ereader.
July 11, 2022
girl what is this… it’s so fake 😭 he’s giving performative.
April 5, 2022
I really love Martin's _American Music_ and I was worried I wouldn't like his other stuff as much, and I'd also heard that this book was really dark, a depressive ode to living in Trump's America. So I held off on getting this, but I finally did, and it's really good.
It is exceptionally dark, about cultural failure, mostly, for the first half of the book. Then, Martin and his wife move to Minnesota and they have a son, and we get the kind of expected load of new dad poems, which inject some hope into the book.
This is solid-- Martin doesn't adhere to the strict three line stanzas from American music, relying here a lot on couplets and single line stanzas. He writes a lot of this kind of poem when he starts with a single phrase and repeats it, adding on a little bit each time, to drill down and excavate some stuff. It mostly works, but it happens so often here, I came to not love it as much as I could. I think I wanted to see what would happen to his subjects if he came at them from a different direction, if he would see them differently.
Still, a really good collection. Someday I'll read the two books that came between _American Music_ and this one.
It is exceptionally dark, about cultural failure, mostly, for the first half of the book. Then, Martin and his wife move to Minnesota and they have a son, and we get the kind of expected load of new dad poems, which inject some hope into the book.
This is solid-- Martin doesn't adhere to the strict three line stanzas from American music, relying here a lot on couplets and single line stanzas. He writes a lot of this kind of poem when he starts with a single phrase and repeats it, adding on a little bit each time, to drill down and excavate some stuff. It mostly works, but it happens so often here, I came to not love it as much as I could. I think I wanted to see what would happen to his subjects if he came at them from a different direction, if he would see them differently.
Still, a really good collection. Someday I'll read the two books that came between _American Music_ and this one.
July 11, 2022
this book is so not it. i felt like i was having an aneurysm while reading it.
"white is snow
white is now
white is no"
like wtf. i get the author was trying to talk about white supremacy but it was just so strange. i honestly found myself laughing the entire time i read it bc it was so bad. literally gabby hannah's poetry book is better than this.
Chris Martin, i feel like you wrote this book thinking this was a masterpiece but u were really just jumbling random words together thinking it was art. it was not art.
do better bitch.
(btw this is a friend of nell strength if u have a problem w me dm me on insta @sophia_c_jenkins) bitch.
"white is snow
white is now
white is no"
like wtf. i get the author was trying to talk about white supremacy but it was just so strange. i honestly found myself laughing the entire time i read it bc it was so bad. literally gabby hannah's poetry book is better than this.
Chris Martin, i feel like you wrote this book thinking this was a masterpiece but u were really just jumbling random words together thinking it was art. it was not art.
do better bitch.
(btw this is a friend of nell strength if u have a problem w me dm me on insta @sophia_c_jenkins) bitch.
August 3, 2024
Poems about...I'm not really sure.
from Itters: "Want to know / But not wanting to Google it / Pure juice of loss / The Top 40 offered to be his sex therapist / A kryptonic geometry where curves are really muted corners"
from Walking Tour of an Imaginary Homeland: "The airplane inside us was running out of pretzels / We took the drugs in the morning so we could see at night / All day clinging to ghastly seaweed on the naked internet ocean"
from Except: "I am alive after all I am / alive but the floating dander // of the dying stings my nostrils I / am alive centipede after gnat"
from Itters: "Want to know / But not wanting to Google it / Pure juice of loss / The Top 40 offered to be his sex therapist / A kryptonic geometry where curves are really muted corners"
from Walking Tour of an Imaginary Homeland: "The airplane inside us was running out of pretzels / We took the drugs in the morning so we could see at night / All day clinging to ghastly seaweed on the naked internet ocean"
from Except: "I am alive after all I am / alive but the floating dander // of the dying stings my nostrils I / am alive centipede after gnat"
April 10, 2021
Not my type of poetry. Repetition, lack of punctuation, and starting the next line in the middle of the previous ones do not define great poetry. The deeper meanings are more important, and they seem kind of obvious, here. As the title poem suggests, Hell is pretty familiar (ie. here). Not the most original concept. To quote Hamlet: “Words, words, words.”
June 30, 2020
Interesting poetry. Enjoyable read.
February 21, 2021
The poet likes lists. I do like the idea of a ‘shitty heaven’ being an all-you-can-eat buffet. Sadly, I am too old and/or too uneducated for this book.
May 15, 2021
The title poem is excellent, as is a short sequence about a birth and toddlerhood. Too many of the poems, unfortunately, are lists that fail to capture the same quality as "Things to Do in Hell."
June 9, 2022
which way western man: cooler ranch or jacked 3d jalapeño pepper jack?
September 29, 2024
I read half then put it down. I like his choice in vocabulary…
But it feels a little, “nobody doesn’t get me” like Alex you’re 18. Sober up and tell Christine you’re sorry.
But it feels a little, “nobody doesn’t get me” like Alex you’re 18. Sober up and tell Christine you’re sorry.
June 15, 2023
Reviewed by Aleksandr Chebotarev on www.rowanglassworks.org.
In his collection of poems, Things to Do in Hell, Chris Martin depicts the mundane in all its hellish glory. Its title sets a tone for the dichotomy within, seemingly belittling the grandeur of hell. His poetry brings attention to life and death, light and dark, pain and mercy, the quotidian and the grandiose. His poems are accompanied by unsettling drawings of everyday objects. These objects, covered in words, act as a sort of visual poetry, going beyond the standard line-by-line poem. The only way I can describe the aesthetic of this book of poetry is a creative, sometimes calm and untheatrical, display of ennui that attempts to connect earth and hell.
What are some things one might do in hell, you may ask? Martin’s titular poem includes mundane and agonizing activities such as, “Grab lunch,” “Try a new flavor of yogurt,” “talk to Steve,” along with “Burn in a lake of fire” (lines 1-8). As you can see, mundanity and agony are side-by-side in his poetry, but mundanity and agony are only two aspects of Martin’s “Tender Hell,” whose relationship to earth is elaborated throughout this collection of unnerving poems and eldritch sketches. This poem also contains monetary motifs, such as, “Polish your silver,” “Sell out the people you used to call friends,” “Exaggerate your earnings,” “Seek employment” (lines 2-21; italics mine). In his rendition of hell, Martin emphasizes greed, perhaps implying that greed is of the gravest of human vices.
Throughout the collection, Martin employs the word “cinema” in an unconventional way. For instance, he uses it to describe the “cinema of sleep” in his poem “A Small Human Being Breaks Everything” (line 27). Reading this with the lines, “Tricking pauses into cinema / Time is one fucked-up dude,” it seems that cinema may stand for cognition or even perception itself (lines 85-6). Martin presents this cinema as inescapable in “Yes the Animals":
"In my arid philosophy in my blue
blossom of fear in my can’t
face another day without the consolations
of cinema in my drought in my east
facing turret in my face clawing
at its mask in my goodnight nurse" (lines 1-6).
The narrator is fearful of this “cinema” in a place of treatment as implied by the presence of a nurse. The cinema, as Martin describes it, is something that follows the viewer throughout reality, even in sleep. Understanding the cinema is essential to discussing this work. We are perpetual, involuntary spectators of the cinema, unaware of whether we are watching earth or hell
Martin presents some interesting social commentary in addition to his abstract view of perception. The author humbly introduces himself in “Answers,” begging the question:
“So of course I wonder
whether we need another
book of poems by another
cis-straight-white Roth IRA” (lines 7-10).
This humility accompanies his commentary. In his titular poem, where he mixes the grandiose with the mundane, Martin features grand moments in politics and civil rights:
“Exaggerate your earnings
Get elected
. . .
Pull down the statues of people who tortured your ancestors” (lines 16-20).
In his depiction of hell, Martin uses world events from our cinema, insinuating that we may be living in a “tender hell” as he calls it.
This review would not be complete without mentioning Martin’s unsettling sketches. Throughout the collection, he includes renditions of everyday items, like a receipt or a cassette tape. These drawings take a sinister turn, bastardizing the quotidian. In one of his visuals, he uses the social security card layout to create an insecurity card.
Given that the card he mocks is given to the masses, this shows that insecurity is assigned to everyone. Perhaps this card is assigned to citizens of Martin’s tender hell. This would explain the Jack O’ Lanterns’ presence, which originate from the story of Stingy Jack whom Satan gave an ember to light his hollowed turnip. This insecurity card is just one of the many ways that Martin bridges the gap between earth and hell.
In his collection of poems, Things to Do in Hell, Chris Martin depicts the mundane in all its hellish glory. Its title sets a tone for the dichotomy within, seemingly belittling the grandeur of hell. His poetry brings attention to life and death, light and dark, pain and mercy, the quotidian and the grandiose. His poems are accompanied by unsettling drawings of everyday objects. These objects, covered in words, act as a sort of visual poetry, going beyond the standard line-by-line poem. The only way I can describe the aesthetic of this book of poetry is a creative, sometimes calm and untheatrical, display of ennui that attempts to connect earth and hell.
What are some things one might do in hell, you may ask? Martin’s titular poem includes mundane and agonizing activities such as, “Grab lunch,” “Try a new flavor of yogurt,” “talk to Steve,” along with “Burn in a lake of fire” (lines 1-8). As you can see, mundanity and agony are side-by-side in his poetry, but mundanity and agony are only two aspects of Martin’s “Tender Hell,” whose relationship to earth is elaborated throughout this collection of unnerving poems and eldritch sketches. This poem also contains monetary motifs, such as, “Polish your silver,” “Sell out the people you used to call friends,” “Exaggerate your earnings,” “Seek employment” (lines 2-21; italics mine). In his rendition of hell, Martin emphasizes greed, perhaps implying that greed is of the gravest of human vices.
Throughout the collection, Martin employs the word “cinema” in an unconventional way. For instance, he uses it to describe the “cinema of sleep” in his poem “A Small Human Being Breaks Everything” (line 27). Reading this with the lines, “Tricking pauses into cinema / Time is one fucked-up dude,” it seems that cinema may stand for cognition or even perception itself (lines 85-6). Martin presents this cinema as inescapable in “Yes the Animals":
"In my arid philosophy in my blue
blossom of fear in my can’t
face another day without the consolations
of cinema in my drought in my east
facing turret in my face clawing
at its mask in my goodnight nurse" (lines 1-6).
The narrator is fearful of this “cinema” in a place of treatment as implied by the presence of a nurse. The cinema, as Martin describes it, is something that follows the viewer throughout reality, even in sleep. Understanding the cinema is essential to discussing this work. We are perpetual, involuntary spectators of the cinema, unaware of whether we are watching earth or hell
Martin presents some interesting social commentary in addition to his abstract view of perception. The author humbly introduces himself in “Answers,” begging the question:
“So of course I wonder
whether we need another
book of poems by another
cis-straight-white Roth IRA” (lines 7-10).
This humility accompanies his commentary. In his titular poem, where he mixes the grandiose with the mundane, Martin features grand moments in politics and civil rights:
“Exaggerate your earnings
Get elected
. . .
Pull down the statues of people who tortured your ancestors” (lines 16-20).
In his depiction of hell, Martin uses world events from our cinema, insinuating that we may be living in a “tender hell” as he calls it.
This review would not be complete without mentioning Martin’s unsettling sketches. Throughout the collection, he includes renditions of everyday items, like a receipt or a cassette tape. These drawings take a sinister turn, bastardizing the quotidian. In one of his visuals, he uses the social security card layout to create an insecurity card.
Given that the card he mocks is given to the masses, this shows that insecurity is assigned to everyone. Perhaps this card is assigned to citizens of Martin’s tender hell. This would explain the Jack O’ Lanterns’ presence, which originate from the story of Stingy Jack whom Satan gave an ember to light his hollowed turnip. This insecurity card is just one of the many ways that Martin bridges the gap between earth and hell.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews