Book Review

What this book cares about most:

Whole, Holy, Hot is a sharp examination of disability, womanhood, and pop culture. Chrissy Martin moves between the cold, impersonal doctor’s office and the intimate gesture of a lover rubbing their warm hands over inflamed nerve endings. Alongside the personal lyric, Martin introduces artifacts from reality TV shows, Playboy interviews, and celebrity memoirs to examine the realities of disabled womanhood: a double edge of infantilization and exotification. And yet, Martin’s poems carry a stubborn whimsy—strutting with a hot-pink cane, scattering meds like rose petals, and the aftertaste of citrus from a pillbox shaped like an orange wedge.

Poems that moved me:

• “When Mary From The Real Housewives Of Salt Lake City Told Jen She Smelled Like Hospital”
• “Teratoma”
• “What Escapes Language”
• “Dumb And Blonde”
• “Upon Discovering There Is Too Much”
• “Four-Week Follow-Up”

Lines that lingered:

• “She tried // to explain I was begging for a missing limb. / Please have a leg became shorthand // for this wanting.”
• “He told me in secret he felt like a mother. / The slick blade of the scalpel cleaving him in half, / the doctors lifting it so carefully they imagined a cry.”
• “the ice has begun to melt, releasing new bodies from Everest. / The Sherpas are getting used to these materializing / bodies, the way their hairs blow back in the wind. / I like to imagine these emerging bodies enjoying / the smallest form of recovery, lifting half-wet in rapture.”

Figurative language and formal feats:

• The recurring image of fire interweaves so many potent meanings: inflammation and pain-relief, flare-ups and the warmth of human touch, the righteous flames of evangelism and the grief ritual of cremation.
• Interspersed throughout the collection, intimate sonnets examine familial relationships, inherited chronic pain, and grief.

This book is in conversation with:

• Standing in the Forest of Being Alive by Katie Farris.
• Disability Intimacy edited by Alice Wong.
• Reality TV culture.

Questions this book made me ask:

• What are the ways that disability and womanhood intersect?
• How do these marginalized identities amplify each other?
• In what ways does society assume they are incompatible?

Who I would give this book to:

• Chronically ill baddies.
• Reality TV fans who are craving poetry.
• That doctor who actually listens to you.