LCP – Member Appreciation Week 2024

What if poetry and prayer are the same: intimate and inconclusive, hopeful and useless, a private communion that hooks you to the thrashing, imperfect world?

Good Want entertains the notion that perhaps virtue is a myth that’s outgrown its uses. 

Exploring the value and shame ascribed to our desires both silly and serious – artistic, superficial, spiritual, relational – these poems grapple with deeply rooted questions: How can there be a relationship between goodness and godliness, if god is a character with shifting allegiances and priorities? Is clarity worth the pain of redefining your experience of the world? Is privacy the same as secrecy the same as deceit? Each caveat becomes a prayer, ritual, invocation, dream, or confession, requiring a blind faith that feels increasingly more impossible to sustain. 

Good Want looks inward, at once both sincere and tongue-in-cheek, to confront the hum of class and intergenerational trauma. Playing with and deconstructing received notions of ‘good,’ ‘bad,’ and ‘god,’ these poems open up a series of further possibilities: empathy for difficult people, acceptance of our difficult selves, and joy in every difficult thing.

“These are lush, provocative poems that luxuriate in unexpected detail while examining how economic precarity shapes both shame and desire. Firmly rooted in the working class, Martinello explores the hunger we inherit from our ancestors, what it means to indulge from a position of bottomless want, and to ‘Waste not your wanting.’ With impressive range, a sense of humor, and entrancing musicality, Good Want is a celebration of the gluttony of girlhood, the paradoxes of faith, and everyday pleasures of a “small, specific life.”
– Cassidy McFadzean, author of Crying Dress

“Good Want is a baroque painting of Dutch aristocracy, but all the subjects’ garments are secretly from Walmart. I mean this in the best way. Each poem cracks me open and out shines a never-before-seen shade of light.” – Shy Watson, author of Cheap Yellow

“Sometimes the confessor reckons with the confessional. In Good Want, it’s a wracking and lucky sometimes, full of piss and vinegar, and one that finds Domenica Martinello performing the wonderment, the depth and push and pull, between what there is to reveal and what each revelation ruptures or binds. Happily, sadly, the poet scours a life lived and unearths inheritances, burdens, and selves destined for and not for the telling. And tells them brilliantly as she pleases.”  – D.M. Bradford, author of Bottom Rail on Top

“Jay Ritchie’s poem’s veer and dare new forms to think and feel in. From sonnets to open, more diaristic armatures, Ritchie’s vexed interiority scans an ever rich and deeply felt ontology that emerges from a backdrop of wit, wonder, and hopeful bewilderment before the social world and its disarmingly absurd repercussions on language. A sure-footed, mighty feat.”—Ocean Vuong, author of Time is a Mother and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Listening in Many Publics is motivated by the possibility of a future that is fulfilling, luminous, and held in common. The book expresses this vision in three long poems which are themselves composed of individual, interlinked poems. Using a circular structure that resists linear capitalist logics, fragmentation that attunes us to sound over sense, and a hybrid form that traverses both poetics and narrative, the poems speak to the necessity of articulating possible futures, of rehearsing different ways of being, and of returning to material truths, together. Plural, civic, and political, the poems locate themselves in the many publics that constitute our individual and social being, interrogate that which brings the subject into existence, and ultimately convey an open, hopeful sensibility in the face of the structures and systems they critique.