New collection from Jennifer Martelli
“They’ve already sent a mother who midwifed her daughter’s abortion to jail. / I don’t say this to my friends as we tour a colonial mansion. I’d ruin the day.” So writes poet Jennifer Martelli in her powerful new chapbook, “Dear Justice” (Grey Book). The collection includes several epistolary sonnets addressed to conservative Supreme Court judges, and Martelli shows, with an astonishing clarity of force, the knot, unentangleable, between the personal and the political. “Remember blackouts?” she writes to Brett Kavanaugh. “I liked beer, too . . . Long ago, before I got sober, I would mark an X / for each day of my period—just in case there was a night / when all I could remember was beer and laughter and lights.” Something burns behind these poems (it’s rage), but testament to Martelli’s poise and control, the expression of it does not close doors, does not end conversations, even when she writes of the men “afraid / of their own impossible hungers.” It’s the quiet smolder — if you know you know — that glows behind the words, that brands onto to mind, and the body, too. Shame lives in these lines — particularly in a poem to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford which recounts a dog mounting her leg when she was a child trying to mail a letter for her mom — and the unforgotten shock of violence, too. She knows that we are on a cusp, approaching precipice, about to fall or shift, who knows, it doesn’t have to be one way. “What if we could sit somewhere high, droppin’ hellebore, / mugwort, thistle, blazin’ stars into the muddy waters?” she asks of Neil Gorsuch. Martelli speaks to a country, vast and faltering, as it careens into an uncertain future where “the cards we’ve been dealt can be reversed and reversed and reversed.”
Literary walking tours of Gloucester
“O Gloucester-man, / weave / your birds and fingers / new, your roof-tops, / clean shit upon racks / sunned on / American / braid,” wrote poet Charles Olson in 1983. He’s not the only literary light who’s associated with Gloucester: T. S. Eliot spent summers of his youth there; Rudyard Kipling wrote “Captains Courageous” after spending ten days in the North Shore fishing town; Judith Sargent Murray wrote essays and poems there; Longfellow’s “The Wreck of the Hesperus” is based in part on a shipwreck off the coast of Gloucester; and Lovecraft’s novella “The Shadow over Innsmouth” has roots in Gloucester, too. Last summer, the Gloucester Literary Committee organized a series of popular literary walking tours, and they’re offering them again this season, in collaboration with the Gloucester Writers Center. “The houses are all gone under the sea. / The dancers are all gone under the hill,” writes Eliot. Tours are led by Phil Storey, and the next one takes place on Saturday, July 13. The tour meets at 10 am in front of the Sargent House Museum gardens, Main Street, in Gloucester. The following tours take place July 27, Aug. 10 and 17, Sept. 7 and 21. The tour is free and no registration is required. For more information, visit gloucesterwriters.org.
GoFundMe started for the Bookloft
Out in the Berkshires, the Bookloft in Great Barrington got its start half a century ago. But sales have dropped in a big way as they approach their 50th anniversary, and they’ve started a GoFundMe to raise funds to keep the place running. The usual slowdown after the holiday frenzy was slower and longer this year, and owner Giovanni Boivin, who took over as owner last year, knew he needed to reach out to the larger community for help. Money raised will help pay bills and, depending how much they get, will form a cushion to lean on in the case of lulls in the future. The fund-raising goal is $100,000, and as of this writing, people have donated nearly $11,000. Buying books, cards, and games is one way to support the store, and donating to the GoFundMe campaign is another. For more information, visit thebookloft.com.
Coming out
“Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel” by Yoko Tawada, translated by Susan Bernofsky (New Directions)
“Carrie Carolyn Coco” by Sarah Gerard (Zando)
“The Anthropologists” by Aysegül Savas (Bloomsbury)
Pick of the week
Sarah Pease of Buttonwood Books and Toys in Cohasset recommends “Last House” by Jessica Shattuck (William Morrow): “I loved this all encompassing tale of a family whose roles highlight all the political movements from post WWII through the present. I felt like I knew and cared for every member of this multigenerational family. It brought back so many memories of living through these times. I could not put it down.”
Nina MacLaughlin is the author of “Wake, Siren.” She can be reached at nmaclaughlin@gmail.com.
