Though I’ve worked with Chrissy Martin at our sister publication, Arcturus, for about a year and a half now, I had never met her in person until this past March at AWP. Chrissy, founding editor and current poetry director of Arcturus, had always been very kind and cheerful over Slack, so I wasn’t surprised when she was exactly the same in real life.
What I wasn’t anticipating was the sheer force that she carried. Energetic and warm, she was a ray of sunshine in the concrete confines of the Baltimore Convention Center, passing out hot pink pencils etched with quotes from her forthcoming debut poetry collection Whole, Holy, Hot, flitting from behind the StoryStudio table to pitch her collection, and complimenting the outfit of every person that walked by.
Whole, Holy, Hot, is in many ways, exactly like Chrissy Martin. You are instantly drawn to the book’s pink and ruby cover, to the Paris Hilton introductory quote, and to poems titled things like, “When Bachelor Pete Told Victoria She Was An Inspiration.” But it becomes clear that Martin’s poetry is a force to be reckoned with—fiery, dynamic, tender, and declarative all at once.
I spoke with Chrissy on writing about health, resilience, and all things reality TV.
For context, I have seen at least one season of every single Real Housewives franchise. I’m a devout reality TV watcher. You can imagine how ecstatic I was when I realized how heavily pop culture influenced the collection is! Poems like “When Mary From The Real Housewives Of Salt Lake City Told Jen She Smelled Like Hospital” and “Centerfolds” really stand out to me in their ability to draw profundity from manufactured moments. What is it about reality TV that inspires your writing?
Reality TV first pulled me in because it is fundamentally communal. Unlike most television, reality TV unfolds episodically, meaning viewers are all watching the same moment at the same time and then collectively interpreting it—recapping, debating, theorizing. It is communal meaning-making. During my PhD, I watched The Bachelor (Pilot Pete’s season) with a group of Psychology professors, and that collective meaning-making clarified for me that what we were doing—close reading gestures, narratives, editing choices, emotional arcs—was not trivial. I had always been drawn to taking popular culture and other forms of “low art” very seriously, but discussing The Bachelor’s thrill-seeking dates as trauma bonding with a room full of Psychology professors made it click for me— “hey, this is research!”
Reality television is commonly dismissed as shallow, unserious, unimportant—but the storylines it produces are anything but neutral. By studying reality TV, we can clearly see the cultural scripts we are being handed: what womanhood is, what bodies are presentable, what a good partner looks like, who is worthy of desire. Because these narratives are framed as “real,” they often circulate with less skepticism than clearly fictional stories. But they are constructed—and the way they are constructed, what is ignored, and what becomes the focus is where meaning-making happens. In studying the way we present reality for consumption, we reveal our cultural attitudes about actual reality.
This collection is so vulnerable in its discussion of the physical and psychological impacts that come with having a chronic illness. What is the relationship between poetry and health for you? Was writing and curating this collection cathartic in any way?
I originally went to poetry for catharsis: writing a poem that no one would see was like writing a letter and throwing it away. The first draft of a poem can be incredibly cathartic. After that, however, the work shifts. I need to think not just about expelling feelings or getting something off my chest, but about how to craft a portrayal of a moment or emotional state so that a reader can experience it alongside me. Writing and revising can also feel like picking at scabs. In order to write about trauma, I have to place myself back in that moment. While revising poems about my father in this collection, I found myself grieving newly. So while poetry can offer release, it can also require returning to feeling again and again.
In this book, health encompasses lived experience over time: the ways vulnerability, limitation, treatment, uncertainty, and care shape how a person moves through the world. Experiences of illness often involve navigating competing narratives—medical language, cultural expectations about productivity, internalized ideas about recovery, and assumptions about which bodies receive care or accommodation—and poetry allows me to slow those narratives down and examine how they interact. Poetry does not cure, but it can create forms capable of holding contradiction without simplifying it. Rather than forcing coherence, many of the poems in Whole, Holy, Hot linger in tension, asking the reader to stay there with me—to experience complexity as something shared rather than solved.
When I read “Five-Hundred Day Follow-Up,” I got chills at the last few lines:
“My dentist says: You bite your cheeks, my
nail technician: You pick at your hands, but
everyone is quiet when I say: Please tell me how
to stop”
Can you speak on the differences and difficulties of writing poetry about health when it’s mental vs. physical?
Thank you for this thoughtful question! Both physical and mental pain are notoriously difficult to translate into language. Elaine Scarry writes in The Body in Pain, “Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability. . . . Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it.” That resistance shapes the formal choices I make. When writing about physical health, I often find myself striving for precision—searching for metaphors that quantify sensation, comparing one day to another, trying to make an experience legible in the way one might need to when speaking with doctors. Many of these poems reach a breaking point, where language stalls or sits in contradiction, reflecting the way pain isolates experience within the body, resisting translation into shared language.
When writing about mental health, however, the challenge feels less about pinpointing sensation and more about representing states of ambiguity, accumulation, unrest, and uncertainty. I tend to aggregate materials—images, research, fragments of dialogue—layering them in ways that enacts the overwhelm the poem is attempting to render. Dialogue, especially, becomes a way of staging the search for clarity that never fully arrives: questions persist, answers remain partial, and the poem inhabits that ongoing process of seeking. In both cases, the poem becomes a space not to resolve pain, but to register the limits of language and to make those limits felt.
You write very honestly about the intimate and complicated intricacies of your familial and romantic relationships. How do you go about writing critically (in both investigative and negative senses) about relationships that can be both contentious and loving?
This is a great question—and one I am still grappling with. One thing that feels important to say is that the book is both true and not true. The poems aim for a kind of capital-T truth—emotional or experiential truth—even when that requires departing from strict factual accuracy. The speaker in these poems is a constructed figure: a version of myself shaped by the needs of the poem and the book. Thinking in terms of the speaker, rather than the autobiographical “I,” allows me to approach relationships investigatively—to ask what tensions might reveal something larger than the particulars of any single life.
My aim is not to resolve contention but to allow love and friction to coexist on the page, since most meaningful relationships contain both. Because my mother appears so frequently in the collection, I did speak with her about the poems before publication. She is a poet herself, as well as someone who shares experiences of chronic illness and neurodivergence, and she understood the project as an attempt to render complexity rather than judgment. Writing about real relationships requires thinking carefully about power, exposure, and care. I try to avoid writing poems that flatten other people into symbols or arguments. Instead, I want the poems to acknowledge partial knowledge: the poem reflects how the speaker experienced the relationship in a particular moment, rather than claiming to represent the other person fully or definitively.
“Flare” is probably my favorite poem in this collection. It moves so fluidly through different definitions of the word, both literal and specifically meaningful to you. Like, the fact that it’s repetitive structurally, but each line feels so unique and raw, is so amazing. What was the construction of this poem like? Did the flow and placement of these types of “flares” come naturally or were there other versions of this piece where connotations of the word were swapped?
While the first draft of this poem was shorter and arranged differently, it is one of the rare pieces that arrived almost fully formed—written in an inspired flurry and changed very little between the first and final draft. That immediacy and wildness appears in the poem, and I was careful not to sand down its rough edges in revision.
At the time I wrote “Flare,” I was thinking about what the book as a whole needed. Throughout the collection, I attempt to articulate the experience of pain in the body—both through physical sensation and through metaphor. Inspired by the form of the ghazal, in which each couplet can stand independently, I wanted to write a long prose poem where each stanza inhabits its own version of “flare.” Each section functions as a separate attempt at articulation: a new angle on pain that doesn’t confirm or revise the previous, but sits alongside it, allowing each definition to refract the others.
(Fun fact: While I wrote “Flare” as a poem, it actually got published in The Cincinnati Review as a micro essay. Depending on the context, I could argue that it belongs to either genre—and I love that the piece makes visible how unstable genre distinctions actually are.)
This is a bit granular, but I love funky titles. Your poem titles are perfect—straightforward, often laugh-out-loud clever, and always beautifully able to encapsulate the point of a poem in just a few words. How do you decide on poem titles? In the same vein, what’s the story behind the title Whole, Holy, Hot?
As my students and I complain all the time, titles are so hard—and the titles of many of these poems did not come quickly or naturally. Usually, for me, the poem comes first and the title comes second. I think about what kind of entry point the poem needs: context or simplicity? humor or seriousness? voice or brevity? Ideally, the title frames the poem’s tension without resolving it, so that by the end of the poem the reader understands the title differently than they did at the beginning. Sometimes I find the title by combing through the poem for a phrase that already contains this pressure—this is how “When My Body Requires an Itinerary” came to be. Through the experience of the poem, the reader comes to understand the title differently than they first did. Other times, especially with the pop culture poems, the title comes first so the reader both has the context they need and can jump into the poem already situated in the moment, as with “When Mary From The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City Told Jen She Smelled Like Hospital.” And if the title is already a little absurd, the reader doesn’t expect the poem to behave.
Finding the right title for this book was its own challenge. I wanted something that could hold heat, femininity, the body, physical and mental illness, religion, inheritance, [and] pop culture. I tried borrowing titles from individual poems and inventing phrases that didn’t appear in the manuscript, but nothing did all the work I wanted. I printed the manuscript and highlighted anything that might serve as a title; then I printed it again, drew a bath, dropped in a pink bath bomb, and read it once more, trying to see possibilities I had missed. In the first poem, “Laying Hands,” I circled the “whole, holy” in the lines “If the healer / placed his palm at the bow of my father’s back, // if his faith was exact in kind and measure, / only then would he be made whole, holy.” I loved the sonic closeness and conceptual tension, but it still lacked the heat and femininity I wanted, so I added “hot” almost instinctively—and it stayed. Now, the title feels like an assertion that ill bodies and minds do not need to be altered in order to be these things: whole, holy, and hot.
I’m sure you’re aware, but every Bravo housewife has a line when they’re introduced in the opening sequence of an episode. If WHH were a housewife, what would its intro tagline be?
What a fabulous last question! I hope you ask every author this from now on. I couldn’t decide on just one, so I hope you won’t mind if I give you three:
“I don’t hide my symptoms—I accessorize them.”
“My coping mechanism is impeccable taste.”
“I make illness look iconic.”
POETRY
Whole, Holy, Hot
By Chrissy Martin
Write Bloody Publishing
Published April 17, 2026
