Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree

by Jennifer Martelli, Eileen Cleary (editor), Martha Mccollough (designer)

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published December 2, 2024

Reviews

[Lesley Wheeler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful and witchy collection with lots of poems about divination and the spirit; sobriety; and the challenges of navigating the world in a woman's body.

[Erin Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the end of “Bryant Park Farmer’s Market,” the speaker says: “Bins of gold winter fruit. Lavender, dried and/ sober. I want to stay here, folded, shameless.” The word “sober” is key here because this is a book about addiction and sobriety. But I want to focus on “shameless” (the word, not the TV series). How have I gone my entire life without realizing that shameless means both exhibiting shameful behavior and living free of shame? That it should be a compliment not an insult? It’s appropriate that I’m asking questions because this fierce and important collection is full of them: questions about the creative process (“Do politics belong in a poem?” “Does forgiveness belong in art?”), about spirituality (“Do you, too, live an un-prayerful life?”), about ethics (“Shall I eat this meat after years of not?”). The title poem ends with a series of questions: “Will we sleep?/ Ever at all? Without nightmares or dreams?” [For her answer to the politics question, see, for starters, “Raising My Son in the Time of Pence.”] This collection has one of the best poem openings I’ve ever read (in “August”): “I confess to you now, I spy on the people I believe/ rejected me. Which means, I spy on the whole world.” It also captures the most important question of “Psychic Party Under a Bottle Tree”: how do we survive abandonment? Maybe we start by thinking of shameless as a virtue, not a sin.

[Carla Panciera · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you haven't read Jennifer Martelli's poetry, I don't know what you're waiting for. I read and re-read her work because I love being startled by language--the same words I've read a thousand times, though never quite like the way she uses them. The piling up of images part earthly, part mythical. From "August":

Once, I dreamt I wore a gold silk and velvet
Delicious apple costume. It felt so warm on my skin
while I dangled from a low tree and watched
a party I hadn't been invited to.
I sent forth a swarm of late-summer electronic bees,
gold-plated with fake onyx stripes—

The stem broke and I fell, bruising my flat shoulder blades.
The smell of wine filled the whole night.

Her poems, their language, their images, their speaker are evocative, tactile, confessional, otherworldly and absolutely of this world. This is a poet at the height of her talents, confident with her craft and singular in her vision. A stunning book.