Martinello, Domenica: Good Want

Coach House Books, paperback

Publication Date: May 21, 2024

Publisher Marketing: A daily ritual to write a single sestet per day generates peeled back poems that consider what it means to be good Good Want irreverently posits that perhaps virtue is a myth that's outgrown its uses. Exploring the value we ascribe to acts of desire, spirituality, and self-articulation, these poems grapple with branching, deeply rooted questions: Can the hunger for more ever be inherently good? How about if you come from nothing? How can there be a relationship between goodness and godliness, if god is a character with shifting allegiances and priorities? Each caveat becomes a prayer, ritual, invocation, or confession. On the spectrum of privacy, secrecy, dishonesty, and shame, there's a fraught balance between acknowledgment and silence. Is clarity worth the potential pain of redefining your experience of the world? It's left to the reader to evaluate whether the power of articulation outweighs the potential for suffering, adding another layer to the complex genealogical and emotional landscape. Turning the gaze inward through layers of irony and sincerity, and framed against the relentless hum of class and intergenerational trauma, Good Want plays with and deconstructs received notions of 'good', 'bad', and 'god' to open up a series of further possibilities: empathy for difficult people, acceptance of our difficult selves, and joy in every difficult thing.