Beginning as a performance poet and dramatist, Martin then shifted to the novel form and has concentrated creative energies here since his first full-length prose work, Outline of My Lover.
[3][4] Outline of My Lover was selected as an International Book of the Year in The Times Literary Supplement by Colm Toibin and adapted in part by The Forsythe Company, along with "Irony Is Not Enough: Essay On My Life As Catherine Deneuve (2nd draft)" by Anne Carson, for the multimedia production "Kammer/Kammer".
[6] The Haiku Year was co-authored with Michael Stipe, Tom Gilroy, Jim McKay, Grant Lee Phillips, and others.
This work was followed by an experimental narrative, Your Body Figured (Nightboat books), which deals with aspects of the lives of the artists Balthus, Francis Bacon and his muse and model George Dyer, and the poet Hart Crane.
[9] A semi-autobiographical novel, Once You Go Back describes growing up in a strained working-class household transplanted to the South, and was a Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in 2010.