Good Want

by Domenica Martinello

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. 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.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

Published May 21, 2024

About the author

Domenica Martinello is a writer from Montreal, Quebec and the author of Good Want (2024) and All Day I Dream about Sirens (2019). She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was the recipient of the Deena Davidson Friedman Prize for Poetry.

Domenica was a finalist for the 2017 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and served as a judge for the award in 2021. In 2023 she won the Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize for her sequence, “Good Want”.

For her prose writing, Domenica won the carte blanche 3Macs Prize for a genre-bending work of literary criticism on Elena Ferrante, and has published reviews and criticism in The Globe & Mail, The Montreal Review of Books, Canadian Notes & Queries, and elsewhere.

She has been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry 2019 and new poems have been published or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, CV2, Arc Poetry, The South Carolina Review, Salt Hill Journal, The Walrus, Maisonneuve, and elsewhere.

Domenica’s work has been supported by The Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

Reviews

[Mariana Jimenez · Rating 4 out of 5]

I felt like this book was playing with me. It tore me apart, bounced my head like a basketball, and then assembled me and my faith back together.

Such beautiful, harrowing imagery and profound reflections. It feels very true to the aesthetics of Christianism while subverting them.

[allison · Rating 5 out of 5]

oh i laaauv this
i put my eye to it's eye likeeee !

[Willow · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Good is what happens / when you stretch God too far." GOOD WANT challenges the pedastaling of virtue, giving voice to the good in the bad and the bad in the good and the God and non-God in all of it, all while being gorgeous and girlish, by which I mean bleeding on the bus to periodtown in the best way possible. Decadent, readable, and enthralling, these poems weave bluntness and vulnerability, religious iconography and 2000s girlhood, lithe with wordplay. The second two couplets of the titular poem come to mind, which go "And who am I / to eat margarine / in the dark cupboard / of my aliveness?" playing with the reader's anticipation of the word "margin," given how the first line (mentioned at the start of this review) implies the visual space of a page—"God" is "[stretched]" by the hands of the poet until She is "good," beyond the little blue lines that tell you where to write and where the paper ends. Poetry is not a synonym for virtue and realizing this lets us get at a deeper, wiser, more sustainable truth, a truth beyond the pageantry of Confession or the rituals of judgement, whether societal or private, a truth that leaves space for our entire selves in all their glory.

[Sagar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good balance of sensory detail and insight.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

|| GOOD WANT ||
#gifted @coachhousebooks
This collection is a real banger! It's lush and rich, it explores what it means to want good things, on shame and desire, the paradoxes of faith, confession it's intimate it's provocative, I absolutely loved it! And I am not a religious person, but the writing in it is exactly the style I live for.

"God said let there be light. And all thats good said, No."

For more of my book content check out instagram.com/bookalong

[Sierra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good Want was an absolute delight. True to her roots, Domenica explores virtue and shame, girlhood and desire. She plays with rhythm and cliché, turns and twists them in ways that surprise you. Good Want is fuelled by confession, but also by power, by understanding where one comes from in order to spring forward into a new status quo.

I hope Domenica continues to grace us with poetry like this - poetry that pokes and prods and toys with the validity of wanting.

[Dan Rougeau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Breathtaking, incredible read

[K.R. Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good Want contains some of the most perfectly shaped, readable poems I’ve read. If there’s a word out of place in here, do me a favour and don’t point it out to me.

[Jerome Ramcharitar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Domenica is a titan.