5 Ethereal Collections to Read If You Love Ethel Cain
Trigger warning: In discussing Ethel Cain’s music, this article references violence and religious trauma.
Ethel Cain’s second album, Perverts, will be released on January 8, 2025, and the first single, “Punish,” already let listeners back into her familiar themes of religious mythology, love, violence, and mortality. Cain’s storytelling makes up a central piece of her music—in fact, she describes her moniker as a “character,” with an arc that includes both running from and reckoning with religious trauma, experiencing tumultuous relationships and heartbreak, and facing extreme violence at the hands of men.
Within her lyrical vignettes, Cain doesn’t shy away from ideas of queerness, the complications of religion and the concept of the American dream, and gender politics. With her beloved debut album, Preacher’s Daughter, Cain addressed these heavy themes while also wrapping listeners in a cinematic and atmospheric Southern gothic landscape—one equally morbid and sweepingly romantic. If you can’t get enough of Cain’s haunting vibes, pair these on-theme collections with your Perverts listening.
1. Hard to Find: An Anthology of the New Southern Gothic, edited by Meredith Janning
If you’re wanting an immersive look into the long-standing legacy of Southern Gothic, you’ll love digging into the pieces in Hard to Find. Though it pays tribute to the movement’s roots and its household names, the anthology also considers how the Southern Gothic has changed and what this literary aesthetic means today. This anthology will let you gain a new understanding of the South, based on the words of writers with deep roots in and love for the complicated, evolving region.
2. Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith
How are violence and tragedy linked to policy, politics, and media? Ethel Cain contends with this question most obviously in her song “American Teenager,” on which she sings about nationalist wartime narratives and their consequences: “The neighbor’s brother came home in a box / But he wanted to go, so maybe it was his fault. / Another red heart taken by the American dream.” In the award-winning collection Blood Dazzler, Patricia Smith also examines the rhetoric of tragedy in the American political context, writing from the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Both Cain and Smith also acknowledge how public response to tragedy is often less empathetic based on identity—with Cain writing from the perspective of poverty, and Smith reckoning with both class and race in her work.
3. Nebraska by Kwame Dawes
On Preacher’s Daughter, Ethel Cain writes from the perspective of someone who has lived a whole life in the South. In his collection Nebraska, poet Kwame Dawes writes from the perspective of an immigrant surprised to find himself there. Despite this stark difference, both works exude a strong sense of place and include riveting, emotionally charged, and at times lonely descriptions of the landscapes that surround them. If you love the song “A House in Nebraska”—which has the refrain “And I still call home that house in Nebraska”—then you’ll love these poems about how places stick with us and what home truly means.
4. Every Good Boy Does Fine by Calvin Arsenia
Like Ethel Cain, musician and writer Calvin Arsenia grew up in an evangelical community and struggled to come into his identity in the midst of homophobia and rigidity. Both Preacher’s Daughter and Every Good Boy Does Fine are journeys of deconstructing faith, with religious imagery serving as an at-times painful and at-times meaningful throughline in both works. Just as Preacher’s Daughter’s first lines are, “These crosses all over my body / Remind me of who I used to be,” Every Good Boy Does Fine explores both Arsenia’s distance from religion and the impact it’s had on him.
5. What the Living Do by Marie Howe
What the Living Do is one of the defining texts of confessional poetry, one that is shocking and courageous in its intimacy. The speaker journeys back through childhood, time-traveling through vivid and unstoppable memories in the wake of her brother’s death. Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter, which could also be considered a confessional work, also muses about the role of memory and painful separation from family.
Looking for more poetry and music pairings? Check out our roundup of collections to read if you listen to Phoebe Bridgers or Olivia Rodrigo.
