Cain, Marty: The Prelude

Action Books, paperback

Publication Date: March 1, 2023

Publisher Marketing:

“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 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, 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