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
Authors
Related Organizations
- Pages
- 112
- Published in
- Canada
Table of Contents
- Cover 1
- Title 5
- Copyright 6
- Dedication 7
- Table of Contents 9
- 1. 13
- I Pray to Be Useful 15
- Solstice 17
- Vague Feast 18
- Good Eye 24
- Butter Receptacle 26
- Power Ballad (Hymn) 27
- Hot Pump 29
- In Bad Dreams 34
- 2. 39
- I Pray to the Pale Fire 41
- Playing House 44
- Asking for It 46
- All the Trimmings 47
- Little Light 48
- Silent Retreat 51
- We Keep Sunlight in the Basement 53
- Circling Back 55
- Sleep Is Trying to Tell Me Something 57
- 3. 63
- I Pray in Screamers House of Horrors 65
- Con 67
- Bad Eye 69
- Parable 71
- Tongue and Groove 72
- Infinity Mirror 74
- I Turn Thirty Far from the Coast 76
- It Follows 78
- On the Day Mary Oliver Died 79
- The Horses Eat Apples 85
- 4. 91
- Good Want 93
- Casino World 105
- Notes 109
- Good Thanks 111
- About the Author 113
