In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Chrissy Martin’s poetry collection Whole, Holy, Hot explores chronic illness with a unique pop culture lens.
Esmé Weijun Wang wrote of the book:
“This collection captures the realities of chronic illness and disability with language that transcends mere description into art. I nod at a phrase that reflects like a kaleidoscope, a poem that takes my breath-reminded I am not alone.”
In her own words, here is Chrissy Martin’s Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Whole, Holy, Hot:
I wrote much of Whole, Holy, Hot to full albums set to play on repeat. Once I’d worn out one album’s spell, I’d move to another. I wanted to stay inside a single artistic world for a while—to let its atmosphere shape the space I was writing from.
The poems in this book span a decade of my life. Many come from an earlier version of me—another city, another headspace. More were written later, once I began to understand what the manuscript needed: what connective tissue this now-living thing required. Because the poems arrived across so much time, I used the albums represented on this list to remind myself how disparate pieces of a work of art can bump, echo, clash, and cohere into one unified whole without flattening into a single note.
Now, when I look at the book, I hear these albums. I’ve been working on a mixed media acrylic painting alongside Whole, Holy, Hot, penciling the albums and audiobooks that accompanied the painting process onto the back of the canvas. If I penciled songs from the foundational albums of this book, the list would look something like this:
- “365” by Charli xcx from Brat and it’s the same but there’s three more songs so it’s not
I listened to Brat—the original, the deluxe, the remixes—obsessively while revising Whole, Holy, Hot, until it played in the back of my ears in silent rooms. Before the deluxe edition, “360” was my favorite: a song about performance on repeat—a knowing wink, a constant nod to being seen, the self aware of the gaze and yet still controlling the terms of that seeing. When the deluxe edition—Brat and it’s the same but there’s three more songs so it’s not—came out, it reframed the album for me, beginning again with “360” and ending with “365.”
“360” is controlled—clean, sharp, built for the camera flash, every movement staged to be seen from every side—a full 360. “365” is a reprise—a return to that opening, but altered—the sound messier, more textured, more reverb, the speaker stuck in the all-consuming, 365-days-a-year cycle of partying, performing, being seen. The control of “360” doesn’t disappear so much as come undone in this return. This is what I want the poems in Whole, Holy, Hot to do: to show a mind and body trying to perform, and to capture the moment when that performance falters, when the mess takes over.
- “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” by Taylor Swift from The Tortured Poets Department
When The Tortured Poets Department was announced, I was ecstatic. I had just gone to the Eras Tour, I was teaching and writing pop culture poetics—I was a poet in a department! I engraved a “The Tortured Poets Department” sign for my office door and counted down the days for its release during National Poetry Month.
When the album arrived, I was disappointed. I didn’t hear what I expect from poetry—concision, precision, fresh language, a depth that forces me to reread. I listen for sound, too—not just direct rhyme, but slant rhyme, echo, repetition and variation—something that complicates the line rather than landing it too cleanly. So when I started the title track and heard the first two lines, “You left your typewriter at my apartment / Straight from the tortured poets department,” I had to pause the album.
After many listens, I met it on its own terms. I stopped asking it to be a poetry collection and let it be what it was. I watched the public response shift, too—from early complaints about its length and unevenness to people settling into it—returning to certain songs, repeating lines, and holding onto what resonated with them. I take this as a lesson in framing: the way a work is presented shapes genre expectations and determines what an audience looks for. Those expectations, in turn, shape how we encounter the work itself.
“Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” understands and plays with the danger of being defined before you speak. “Little old me” begins diminutive, but the song builds until the phrase becomes theatrical, accusatory, dangerous. When Swift sings, “So tell me everything is not about me / But what if it is? / Then say they didn’t do it to hurt me / But what if they did?” her questions turn reassurance inside out. What should soothe the speaker instead sharpens her. The song doesn’t escape its title; it mutates it. This is what I mean when I say framing matters: the title didn’t just name the album; it shaped what I expected the album to do.
That is what I mean when I say framing matters—the title didn’t just name the album, it shaped what I expected the album to do. More specifically, it made me think about titles: how they do not simply describe what follows, but teach an audience how to hear it. Sometimes the work fulfills that promise; sometimes it has to fight the title, stretch it, or make it strange. I thought about this often while titling the poems in Whole, Holy, Hot—especially the poems whose titles name a pop culture moment before complicating what that moment means. A title can act as a frame, a joke, a headline, a dare, or a trapdoor.
- “Kill Me” by Hayley Williams from Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party
Before Hayley Williams released Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party as a full, sequenced album, she released it as a series of singles. She encouraged listeners to choose their own order, and many did, making Spotify playlists with their own arcs, turns, and emotional logic. I was interested in that freedom, but also in the way the official album eventually arrived and said: here is one possible shape.
“Kill Me” kept pulling me back because it names something Whole, Holy, Hot circles again and again: the knowledge that pain is not only personal, but inherited. The song understands the body as a bloodline, a place where other people’s grief—especially women’s grief—can keep living. The song opens with Verse 1:
Eldest daughters never miss their chances
To learn the hardest lessons again and again
Carrying my mother’s mother’s torment
I think I’m where the bloodline ends
I’ll never do the right thing again
In the second verse, the repetition changes the assignment. The daughter is no longer only carrying inherited pain, but is expected to stop it. What begins as bloodline becomes burden. That feels central to Whole, Holy, Hot: the way pain can arrive as inheritance and then become a responsibility the speaker never agreed to carry.
- “Favorite Daughter” by Lorde from Virgin
In “Kill Me” by Hayley Williams, the daughter is burdened with carrying and ending the bloodline’s pain. In “Favorite Daughter,” the daughter is performing toward someone—singing, winning, working, breaking herself—in the hope that being excellent enough might repair something she did not break. The song captures the exhausting belief that if you just do enough, if you are good enough, if you achieve certain markers of success, then you might finally be praised, respected, and cared for by the very people meant to protect you.
Lorde sings in the second chorus:
Cause I’m an actress, all of the medals I won for ya
Panic attack just to be your favourite daughter
Everywhere I run, I’m always runnin’ to ya
Breaking my back to carry the weight of your heart
The medals are proof of goodness: look what I made, look what I survived, look what I became for you.
- “American Teenager” by Ethel Cain from Preacher’s Daughter
Across Preacher’s Daughter, Ethel Cain traces an interconnected lineage of women through religious trauma, the patriarchal power bound up in it, and the violence it makes possible. The album’s final single, “American Teenager,” is a haunting dissection of religious inheritance and the American Dream. It distills that inheritance into a national fantasy. Its handclap-driven pop beat makes the promise sound almost radiant: be good, be faithful, be beautiful, be hopeful, support your country, and save yourself. Maybe then the world will love you back. But the brightness falters when Cain sings, “And Jesus, if You’re there / Why do I feel alone in this room with You?” Suddenly, the fantasy reveals its loneliness: God, country, and self-reliance have not saved her.
- “Everything is romantic featuring caroline polachek” by Charli xcx from Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat
I hear the original version of “Everything is romantic” as a poem of witness, a list poem that lets a place or moment come into focus through detail, association, and accumulation rather than explanation. When Charli sings, “Lemons on thе trees and on the ground / Sandals on the stirrups of the scooters,” I hear a poetics of attention: everything is poetry if we look at it with enough curiosity. This is why I had my Introduction to Creative Writing students write their own “Everything is _____” list poems, asking them to gather beautiful, strange, or intriguing things they had seen without explaining what those details add up to.
The remix of “Everything is romantic” with Caroline Polachek is haunting in its melody and lyricism. The images listed are less pastoral and more political (“ACAB tag on a bus stop sign”) and this song’s premise is two women speaking on the phone, asking, “Everything’s still romantic, right?” Polachek answers:
Late nights in black silk in East London
Church bells in the distance
Free bleeding in the autumn rain
Fall in love again and again
Hearing “Free bleeding in the autumn rain” posited as romantic stopped me in my tracks. Like Whole, Holy, Hot, it treats the unsanitized body as beautiful, refusing the pressure to make embodiment cleaner, quieter, or easier to look at. And the vocal flips that Polachek executes right after these lines sound like the body refusing containment too: the voice breaking open, turning almost acrobatic, making beauty out of strain, excess, and release—while also being, simply, gorgeous.
- “Florida!!! (feat. Florence + The Machine) ” by Taylor Swift from The Tortured Poets Department
There is something about a feature with another female musician that allows a song to be especially volatile—the harmony becomes conspiracy, the accompaniment permission.
“Florida!!!” begins with the sound and sense of danger, lightly undercut by the line, “And my friends all smell like weed or little babies.” And what a way to encapsulate the asynchrony of early adulthood! As in Whole, Holy, Hot, in “Florida!!!,” home isn’t a place of solace:
Little did you know your home’s really only
A town you’re just a guest in
That thought later darkens into:
Little did you know your home’s really only
The town you’ll get arrested
Like “no body, no crime (feat. HAIM)” on evermore, “Florida!!!” turns the female feature into a site of conspiracy, retaliation, and shared escape. The first three lines below directly echo “no body, no crime,” invoking a world where women know, cover for, and avenge one another. But the song quickly shifts from external revenge plot to something more interior and dangerous: the speaker recognizes the risk of what she has said. That recognition becomes both protection and defiance—I know this is wrong to say, but also, I am saying it anyway:
All my girls got their lace and their crimes
And your cheating husband disappeared, well
No one asks any questions here
So I did my best to lay to rest
All of the bodies that have ever been on my body
And in my mind, they sink into the swamp
Is that a bad thing to say in a song?
That question becomes both shield and dare: an acknowledgment that the confession has crossed some invisible line, and a refusal to walk it back. Whole, Holy, Hot is interested in that same charged threshold, where exposure becomes not a failure of control, but a form of power.
- “Mirtazapine”by Hayley Williams from Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party
I love this song because of the celebratory, joyful, companionate way it addresses medication. And it is the addressee in this song—pardon, “she” is the addressee in the song. The chorus repeats:
Mirtazapine
You make me eat, you make me sleep
Mirtazapine
You let me dream, you let me dream
Mirtazapine has agency—making Williams eat but letting her dream, perhaps literally, but also allowing her to dream of a future—to even want a future. Those of us on medications are often spoken to as if the medication is the issue, not the ailment we’re seeking medication for. Antidepressants in particular are often demonized, treated like a crutch—an ironic insult, considering a crutch, like an antidepressant, is an assistive tool, not a failure of will. Williams, instead, calls Mirtazapine her “genie in a screw cap bottle,” someone she “could never be without” and so “had to write a song about her.”
Likewise, the poems in Whole, Holy, Hot treat medication as potential magic, as precious, as companion. My poems do not call the pills “she,” exactly, but they do call diagnosis “she”—shifting what could be clinical and adversarial into a female solidarity.
For these reasons, “Mirtazapine” feels like a musical counterpart to Shira Erlichman’s Odes to Lithium, a poetry collection I find enormous kinship with. Williams and Erlichman both write against the fantasy that medication dilutes the self. Instead, medication becomes part of the lyric architecture of survival: not the opposite of feeling, but one of the conditions that makes feeling—and dreaming—possible.
Williams does not, however, let relief erase complexity. When she asks, “Who am I without you now?” the line trembles between devotion and existential fear: the love-song logic of I cannot imagine my life without you, braided with the more destabilizing question of who the self is without the medication that has helped make life bearable.
- “If She Could See Me Now” by Lorde from Virgin
While “Favorite Daughter” performs in hopes of being affirmed by someone else, “If She Could See Me Now” turns that desire inward, imagining what it would mean to be witnessed by the self who once had to survive—after the performance, after survival, and at the threshold of leaving survival mode.
The song grapples with gendered violence, and with the ways we romanticize and mythologize our own pain, trying to make suffering feel significant because otherwise it might simply be, well, suffering:
Baby, whenever you’d break me
I’d watch it happen, like an angel looking down
Ah-ah, ah
It made me a woman, being hurt like that
I can feel, don’t need fantasy
Oh, God, if she could see me now
While the chorus calls the past self “she,” the immediately preceding verse addresses that self directly as “you.” Lorde sings of “exorcising / All my demons” before arriving at the startlingly intimate claim, “Yesterday I lifted your body weight.” The past self isn’t scolded or disavowed, but addressed with the tenderness of someone eager to say: look where we’ve made it to.
- “Family Tree” [or other song] by Ethel Cain from Preacher’s Daughter
“Family Tree (Intro)” concludes the playlist because it shares Whole, Holy, Hot’s interest in the forces that script a self before that self has language to answer back. The song is not only about inheritance, but also about ritual: family, faith, gender, shame, and fear becoming an atmosphere the speaker has to breathe, resist, and sing from.
For the first thirty-five seconds, a slow, reverberating bass line descends through a spoken sermon, as if an ominous ritual is already underway. A male voice declares, “a woman, a mother, a mother is a very special thing,” collapsing womanhood into motherhood. The sample is from Cain’s paternal great-grandmother’s funeral: what an honor for her to be carried forward in song, and what grief to hear a woman remembered through the narrow language of sanctified motherhood. But by sampling the sermon here, Cain also recovers her great-grandmother from that framing, letting her memory become something stranger, larger, and less obedient than the funeral language by itself allowed. The sermon’s logic of sacred motherhood curdles into the song’s larger claim: not even Jesus is exempt from traumatic inheritance:
Jesus can always reject his father
But he cannot escape his mother’s blood
He’ll scream and try to wash it off of his fingers
But he’ll never escape what he’s made up of
The chorus then repeats:
The fates already fucked me sideways
Swinging by my neck from the family tree
He’ll laugh and say, “You know I raised you bеtter than this”
Then leavе me hanging so they all can laugh at me
The family tree is no longer only lineage; it is gallows, spectacle, and audience. The speaker is made by the family and punished by it, raised by its logic and then left hanging inside it. That is why “Family Tree (Intro)” feels like the right place to end. Like Whole, Holy, Hot, it refuses the fantasy that naming what made you or hurt you means being freed from it. The book’s final poem refuses to smooth survival into redemption. It takes place in the after, just over the threshold of survival mode, where crossing over does not mean becoming untouched. What remains is the frightening possibility of an after: the hope that the worst might be over, and the fear that without pain at the center, the self will have to learn its own shape again.
Chrissy Martin is the author of the poetry collection Whole, Holy, Hot (Write Bloody Publishing, 2026). Her work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Cherry Tree, swamp pink, Harpur Palate, and elsewhere, earning nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets. She holds a PhD from Oklahoma State University and an MFA from Columbia College Chicago. Co-founder and Poetry Director of Arcturus, she is also an assistant professor of English at Centenary College of Louisiana.