Manahil Bandukwala

Domenica Martinello, GOOD WANT

Toronto: Coach House Books, 2024. $23.95

Domenica Martinello’s Good Want shifts from profound to funny and back again. The collection is structured in four sections. The first three open with poems beginning with the phrase “I Pray”; the fourth and final section breaks from this pattern, and opens with the titular poem, “Good Want.” Right from the beginning, Martinello raises questions about the differences between praying and wanting. One has a religious connotation, while the other feels more tied to the everyday.

Martinello opens with two epigraphs, one from Mary Ruefle, and one from Hera Lindsay Bird. The latter of the two riffs on Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese,” stating: “You do not have to be good. / Being good isn’t even the point anymore.” The collection then shifts into the opening poem, “I Pray to be Useful,” where Martinello writes: “I could not keep my gaze downcast, / humble, groundward. / I could not fast.” Already there is an expectation of the speaker’s “lack of goodness.” And yet, the epigraph has instructed the opposite. Will the speaker listen to the epigraph’s instructions, or will she continue mulling over where her goodness falls short?

The poet oscillates between the sacred and the profane and has a playful time doing so. Oftentimes, the line between sacred as religion and sacred as poetry, or as an art form, blurs. In “Power Ballad (Hymn),” Martinello writes directly to an experience many writers and artists are familiar with—writing grant applications:

Tell the nice officer of the arts
about the time your dad

took the metro at midnight
to Burger King
on Christmas Eve

but make it a metaphor
about piety and meat.
I assume all the artists are lying

and I lie too.

Underneath the humour of these lines is a suggestion of the guilt of success, at whether the fulfilling of a want is earned. And yet, the poem closes embracing the imperfectness of wanting and its results.

Martinello’s speakers take on different forms of life to grapple with how we want in different situations in our lives. In “Solstice,” the speaker “was a daughter plant / squeezing the soft earth too tightly, / trying nightly to will myself green.” Can the fact that we want something so deeply be all that is needed to undergo a transformative change? Again, her speaker shifts with each dream in “In Bad Dreams,” asking “What does it mean / to dream in the cadence of animal / suffering, in the refrain / of oops.” There’s always a surprise in Martinello’s language. Lines of poetry shift from talking about “[slipping] sunlight / into our purses, down our slips” to “horse metaphors / even for those of us / with zero access to a horse” to one’s “stomach [growling] / a low, evil frequency” in a confession booth. This isn’t a book that lets you get comfortable. Instead, unexpected speakers, instances, and thoughts appear on every page.

Mary Oliver appears in Good Want as more than just a reference in an epigraph. “On the Day Mary Oliver Died” upholds Oliver’s gentle poetics while also poking fun at the seriousness of poetry and those who consider certain poetry beneath them. For Martinello, everything is poetry, from cliché sunsets to having your period on the bus. “If you find this trite that’s on you / blood drips pastorally down my leg,” she writes. The sarcasm underlying the tone, present in a number of poems, is comforting. Rather than being self-conscious about her period, Martinello’s speaker is self-aware; she reflects on her own journey and through her poems, invites the reader into “the gutter of [her] imagination / that imperfect escape hatch.”

The book closes first with forgiveness—“I forgive you for not understanding this loose gesture, / as I forgive everyone, everything”— and then with permission: “Domenica, when you learned / to say no // that was your power / And when you learned to say yes / and to keep on saying it // That was your power too.” Martinello does not make herself or her reader choose between the two.

Despite the precarity of capitalism, girlhood, finances, or life itself, the poems carry on. We keep wanting, and we can keep on wanting, and no one can declare that want bad or good. Even though there is so much out of our control, these poems remind us that our choices, and our actions, belong to us, and there is something good within that realization.