The Prelude

by Marty Cain

"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, author of With Deer "Poems of momentous and exhilarating beauty, I'm so attentive and awestruck."-- Dennis Cooper, author of I Wished "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 overturned police truck. For the sublime panic attack, or Living in the Corpse That Floats on the Surface . For poetry 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, author of Diary of the Plague Year "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, author of The Contortionist Whispers Poetry.

Genres: Poetry

106 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2023

Reviews

[mallory payne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t think I’ll read any poetry this year that speaks more clearly. I feel the references to Wordsworth and his pastorals in both the direct reference like the smattering of cathedral anatomy and quotations and in Cain’s attention to the environment around him. I also see what Cain sees in the world, a more gothic and gorey image like corpses and blood and what feels almost like a pixelated image that exists alongside reality. I had felt it in some poems but it solidified more clearly when I read the acknowledgments but Stan Brakhage’s short films and the sort of flicker of Dante’s Quartet and the observation of the violent mundane in The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes. I will reread again and again to sit with it more after I reread Wordsworth’s The Prelude. Cain is a master of the experimental lyric.
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On a personal note, as I am rapidly approaching grad school I have been struggling to pick a “lane” of study and begin a thesis where I can marry my love of British Romantic poetry and my love of contemporary experimental poetry. I am greatly comforted that someone out there has done it so masterfully.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Without full appreciation of the underlying reference points — I haven’t read much Wordsworth, though I picked up a copy of his Prelude after reading Cain’s homage — I’m clearly just skimming the surface, but what a surface text it is! Cain’s verse leaps off the page and tears into the darker recesses of memory. At times it feels like an experimental collage of modes and methods, but the verse itself is pure music - rhythmically precise, clean as a razor, viscerally sharp. I run out of words trying to describe poetry that speaks to me on a deeper level, and I am officially out of words. Highly, highly recommended.