Things to Do in Hell

Are we living in a shitty heaven or a tender hell? Chris Martin’s poems wrestle with reconciling the shocking horrors and common graces of everyday life in America.

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.

Publication date: October 6, 2020

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 112 pages 

ISBN: 9781566895958

Chris Martin is the author of four books of poetry and the recipient of grants from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. He is the co-founder and executive director of Unrestricted Interest, an organization dedicated to helping neurodivergent learners transform their lives through writing. He lives in Minneapolis, where he professes at Hamline University and Carleton College.

“Masterful, breathless, and prescient, Chris Martin’s fourth poetry collection, Things to Do in Hell, is both antidote and screed, reliquary and reckoning. There’s no turning back.”

—Su Hwang

“Things to Do in Hell brings all these contradictions together, suggesting that even if all we have in the end is our restless inquisitiveness, we take it and we run!”

—Roy Guzmán

“The multitudinous riches presented in this engaging book are vast and stretch deep into our psyches. Pleasure is a deep and syncopated virtue in Things to Do in Hell, while the wisdom of this collection provides a constant and needed nudge.”

—Oliver de la Paz