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WINNER! Italian American Studies Association Book Award, 2023!
Named a "Must Read" by the Massachusetts Center for the Book
As its intriguing title suggests, The Queen of Queens places royalty alongside the commonplace, parallels contemporary and retrospective, juxtaposes fine with rough. In these unswerving poems, the drugs, pop music, and rocket crash that defined the 80’s eerily evoke our era of Trump. The book’s speaker laments, “I fear no one / will ever hear me,” and Martelli’s “queens”—from Geraldine Ferraro to Madonna, Nancy Pelosi to Molly Ringwald—embody the collection’s resistance against gender oppression, political sexism, and ongoing threats to reproductive rights, while reminding us that one strong woman can lift us all. This is a powerful account of past and present, strung like the book’s frequently recurring pearls—symbol of femininity but also proof that a source of struggle can generate uncommon beauty. I will return to these translucent poems again and again. Jennifer Militello, author of The Pact
In long, powerful lines that don’t sacrifice any of their music, Jennifer Martelli thrusts us back into the mid-80s when the Italian-American speaker is coming of age in college as the first woman (also an Italian-American) is nominated for Vice-President of the United States. These poems are both beautiful and brutal, artful and angry, finely-crafted and fierce. Each poem proves the personal is political and that the same concerns about equity for women that were prevalent forty years ago are just as crucial today. In a magical sleight of hand, Queen of Queens captures both optimism and disappointment, the progress that had been made and the ways we have plateaued. In complex, intelligent poems that are not afraid to grapple with difficult topics, including misogynist rhetoric from other women, Martelli has answered her own question, "how do we survive sadness?” Martelli writes about it—all the secrets and mistakes. All the false hopes and struggles. She makes bold art from history and we, her readers, are the wiser for it. Jennifer Franklin, author of No Small Gift
Click HERE to buy My Tarantella now!
Named a "Must Read Book" by the Massachusetts Center for the Book
Awarded an Honorable Mention from the Italian American Studies Association
Finalist for the Housatonic Book Award
"I love this book with its strength and riskiness, its weaving of the Kitty Genovese story with the narrator’s own story and life. The details Martelli provides seem so real, so rooted, so perfect for these two intertwined tales . . . This is a book I won’t soon forget. Certainly, it’s a book not to be missed."
~ Maria Mazziotti Gillan, American Book Award winner
"Rarely have a I read a collection as thoroughly haunted and haunting as Jennifer Martelli’s My Tarantella, its hanging globe lamps dimming in the jewel-toned aftermaths of neighbor- hoods where the speaker’s Italian upbringing melds into har- rowing song for Kitty Genovese and those women violated by the preying mantises of this too-often violent world. Martelli writes, “This is how the Queen of the Night tulips topple: first, their lips / let loose the dark petals: // they puddled like a silk gown.” This collection shines its eerie and gorgeous light, filling the shadows with tarot readings for Genovese, artichoke leaves hiding secret gifts, and a whole history recast from the shimmering margins. This collection is so painfully exquisite, “It hurts my hoarse throat, my blue heart.”
~ Jenn Givhan, author of Girl with Death Mask
Awarded an Honorable Mention from the Italian American Studies Association
Finalist for the Housatonic Book Award
"I love this book with its strength and riskiness, its weaving of the Kitty Genovese story with the narrator’s own story and life. The details Martelli provides seem so real, so rooted, so perfect for these two intertwined tales . . . This is a book I won’t soon forget. Certainly, it’s a book not to be missed."
~ Maria Mazziotti Gillan, American Book Award winner
"Rarely have a I read a collection as thoroughly haunted and haunting as Jennifer Martelli’s My Tarantella, its hanging globe lamps dimming in the jewel-toned aftermaths of neighbor- hoods where the speaker’s Italian upbringing melds into har- rowing song for Kitty Genovese and those women violated by the preying mantises of this too-often violent world. Martelli writes, “This is how the Queen of the Night tulips topple: first, their lips / let loose the dark petals: // they puddled like a silk gown.” This collection shines its eerie and gorgeous light, filling the shadows with tarot readings for Genovese, artichoke leaves hiding secret gifts, and a whole history recast from the shimmering margins. This collection is so painfully exquisite, “It hurts my hoarse throat, my blue heart.”
~ Jenn Givhan, author of Girl with Death Mask
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All Things Are Born to Change Their Shapes What we are reminded of in Jennifer Martelli’s All Things Are Born to Change Their Shapes is that women have been mythologized as a means to control, and, therefore, it is best to lean into this mythology and adopt the guise of the witch we are so often accused of being, or risk eclipse. There is power in that magic as Martelli demonstrates with these talismanic poems of fauna, flora, and monstrous women. Martelli has built a world for us, and in that world—haunted by the ghosts of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton—fog slinks through the trees, and among those trees the women either shapeshift, or they perish. --Sonia Greenfield, Author of Letdown The poems in this collection are sharp as “bone blades”, electric as “live wires”, their lines unfolding like “the rind pared off with a sharp knife into a perfect coil”. Mythical and literary figures roam the pages as so much more than symbols or ghosts—they are fused with the brutality and beauty of culture and social consciousness, here to give shape to the present moment. While Martelli spells the reader with images of talons, owls, skeletons, and snakes, she also notes that, “A poem is not a list of pretty things”. After reading this collection, one would not dare to reduce these poems into something as frail as “pretty”— they are instead gigantic, powerful, and unflinching. I could not look away, nor did I want to. --Megan Merchant, Author of Before the Fevered Snow The poems in Jennifer Martelli’s All Things Are Born to Change Their Shapes are elemental, allegorical, imaginative, shape-shifting, and brave. She begins the book with instructions and a spell of protection, a digging down for a walling out: a moat. And the poems make their own castle, sarcophagus, owl pellet. They are occupied with what cleaves and is cloven. They are of sex, and blood, and bodies, and bones, and violence visited upon women, from Grecian punishments, to the Handmaid’s Tale, to Polanski, to Hillary Clinton. They ghost, moon, haunt, and Ouija. Martelli has a whale-sized mind, generous and expansive. Her work is sacred and profane as Mary’s bathtub half-shell, resilient as the beating heart of Joan of Arc after her burning. This poet knows trees are magic witches and rhubarb wears crowns. How a snake is born from “your friend’s arm in a black Danskin holding out a Granny Smith apple.” I want to say I think of Lucie Brock-Broido, of Brigit Pegeen Kelly, of Sexton and of Plath. And these giants walk through her poems, it’s true, but in the end there is such astonishing originality in Martelli’s lines that she crowds out all associations with her brilliance. -- Rebecca Hart Olander, editor/director of Perugia Press & author of Uncertain Acrobats Buy your signed copy of All Things Are Born to Change Their Shapes now! |
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Buy a signed copy of After Bird!
All of the finalist manuscripts for the 2016/2017 “Season” Open Reading were read by both Ann Dernier and me, and our findings were much the same. This year’s “winner” is Jennifer Martelli and her awesome chapbook, After Bird.
~ Grey Book Presss
All of the finalist manuscripts for the 2016/2017 “Season” Open Reading were read by both Ann Dernier and me, and our findings were much the same. This year’s “winner” is Jennifer Martelli and her awesome chapbook, After Bird.
~ Grey Book Presss