Remyth is a baptism and an exorcism. It’s Hip-Hop and Punk. It’s high art meeting low art at the church altar. It’s a Works Cited page meeting with a ruthless remix culture unwilling to claim ownership and more than willing to take what it needs to make meaning.

Remyth is a concept that is indebted to remix culture and self-preservation. The spirit of this book is a ritual in form and content, aiming to make sense of a life filled with social media, distrust, anxiety, depression, pop culture, and longing for the feelings that relics of the past can create. This collection of poetry joins various poetic styles (such as prose, rhizomes, futurist, and free verse) to highlight the psychic and corporeal effects of being a multicultural 20-something navigating identity post-heartbreak and in the nascent stages of coming to terms with childhood traumas. 

Winner of Inlandia Institute’s 2019 Hillary Gravendyk Regional Prize.

Early reviews

"In this startling collection, Adam D. Martinez wields his words like thrown knives. He jars the reader out of a media dream and forces a reappraisal of the primitive forces that still course within humanity and to which the modern mind has become dulled. In this poet's hands, the concepts we thought we understood from the television screen are wrenched out from behind the glass and back into a shape of uncanny recognition. This is shocking and accomplished work."

— Tom Zoellner, New York Times best-selling Author of Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire

“The electrifying debut collection by Adam D. Martinez, Remyth: A Postmodernist Ritual, sparks with the reinvention and remixing of urban mythologies, exploding in a collision of polarities: the sacred and profane, violence and reconstruction, and fleeting moments of beauty in the heart of a “perfumed apocalypse” as the poet rhapsodizes on “lost angels in Los Angeles.” This city is a hyperreal desert of pyrotechnics where “all of life is a burning house.” In this lightning-struck world of paradox and pop culture, Martinez muses, ‘I am the news and I’m happening so fast.’” 

— Karen An-hwei Lee, author of The Maze of Transparencies

“The audacious poems in Remyth: A Postmodern Ritual ‘bleed language’ and ‘shake the foundation.’ These poems do not shy away from anything; they bite your tongue. In this book, Adam Martinez challenges what we mean by the self and the singular I and examines all sorts of fuckery, from the white male gaze to infidelity to the news. His fearless poetic voice takes the form it craves in each stunning moment.”  

— Anna Leahy, author of What Happened Was…