All Things Are Born to Change Their Shapes

by Jennifer Martelli
(Harbor Editions, 2023) 

Reviewed by Carla Panciera

Jennifer Martelli’s chapbook, All Things Are Born to Change Their Shapes, requires you to leave your inhibitions at home. In the collection’s opening poem, the speaker declares that she can build a moat overnight “with the shoulder blades of a larger mammal to dig up sedges,” and once it is completed, she can fill it with alligator shoes and purses. Clearly, this is a poet ready to test your powers to imagine—a writer determined to create a world you might mistake for mythical and a perspective that might seem impenetrably singular.

There is a quirky and idiosyncratic curator involved here, one enthralled by oddities such as kewpie dolls, gargoyles, owl chopsticks, even a collection of sterling forks, each of which “was a woman once, punished or saved.” The speaker admits, “something in me takes things in its quiet talons, swoops, / leaves whole bones, and once, the long vertebrae of a snake.” I imagine this conservator resides in the kind of cottage that would have attracted dangerous attention from her neighbors circa 1692 if they spied her packing ice about her Queen of Night bulbs, say, or witnessed her penchant for owls, or saw the altars she built filled with “root-food, the gourd; / tools; a knife, a sickle; an orange yarn God’s eye.” At first, these objects seem to set the speaker apart, to declare her as other, until we look around at our own strange accumulations. Yes, we are marked as individuals by our specific choices, but we are also part of a tribe of gatherers. Jennifer Martelli’s poems remind us that we, too, are both otherworldly and of this world. 

This is one of the book’s and the poet’s strengths. Martelli’s poems don’t sound like anyone else’s. She is a lyricist, and her voice on the page is as distinctive as her Boston (specifically Revere) accent. When you read a Martelli poem, you can’t confuse it with anyone else’s, but that voice, as unique as it is, invites you into a sisterhood. Martelli is also the author of My Tarantella and The Queen of Queens (both from Bordighera). In earlier volumes, she pays tribute to Kitty Genovese, Geraldine Ferraro, Hillary Clinton, Shirley Chisholm, and Kamala Harris. This time, she invokes sister-poets. Several poems begin with epigraphs by Sylvia Plath. One derives its title from Anne Sexton. Martelli mentions Jane Kenyon, Jean Valentine, Lucie Brock-Broido. There is something dark and magical about a group of women, about the curatives and curses we inherit and bequeath, about how one generation depends on the voices of those who have come before her, both those women whose words we have and those whose words are lost to us. 

Women witness enormous change in their bodies: menstruation and menopause, giving birth, nursing and then drying up. We watch our own mothers age and forget us. But this intimacy with shapeshifting allows us to recognize that it is the nature of everything to change. Bulbs become flowers; fruit ripens and goes bad; rocks wear down to grit; tree limbs snap off in the cold. Even the Queen of Night tulip bulbs that arrive “airless and misshapen” are described as women who “grip their own toxin / and beauty in a tight fist.” The bulbs understand the nature of things, know “they need to lie dormant, / sleep dreamlessly, slow their memory of bloom.” If we are all part of cycles we cannot control, then at least we know we are not alone with them, we can hope something better awaits. 

That doesn’t mean that we aren’t afraid. In this collection, even fears grow to gigantic proportions. In a world where Walgreens is next to the gallows where the victims of the Salem witch trials hanged, where a woman is “made famous for fellating her boss,” or where, despite having raped a thirteen-year-old girl, Roman Polanski continues to film Tess in a place where “from the barrow mounds beyond the chalk circle, they dug up arrows, a bronze torque around / a child’s neck bones, dolerite axe handles, bone blades,” how can anyone derive any lasting comfort?

The speaker’s own fears are made clear in “Women Who Can’t Breathe (Featuring Women from The Mummy; The Handmaid’s Tale; Kill Bill, Vol. 2)”: 

I am obsessed with women suffocated.

First, there were the Vestal Virgins buried alive in that honeycomb

field outside of Rome. Next, the little walled wife

in that Balkan church with the hole in her tomb

to nurse her son through those first few days of her burial.

Then, the Scottish nun’s bones found in the wall of an abbey.

This poem, in six parts, examines all of the ways in which women have been silenced and the communal effort it takes to achieve that. Just as Martelli fills some poems with charms and objects, in this one, she gathers allusions from mythology, ancient history, Hollywood, and Netflix. We are all disparate, but we are also connected, and understanding that, we don’t have to look away or remain silent. 

More than anything, this collection, with its haunting cover art by Fay Ku, feels like a book of spells. Readers derive some comfort in the idea that we, too, are conjurers. Here are the secrets, these poems seem to say. Here are the reasons why we must persist in creating. We, who also levitated girls off basement floors, who felt the Ouija’s planchette slide, who built altars filled with talismans. We who felt our connection to the moon, who felt the things of this world watching us: owls and trees and strangers whose stories we think we know. Whose stories we can’t unknow. Whose stories deserve our acknowledgement. 

When readers look up from this chapbook, they might be surprised to see daylight, the mundane view of a neighbor’s slumbering beds of tulips that will bloom yellow and red, cars with drivers who would never think to pause before a crosswalk to study a woman’s face and witness her pain, bicyclists whose paths no doubt traverse old bones. “A poem is not a list of pretty things,” Martelli declares, nor is life, though the pages of this stunning collection remind us we are not alone with this truth.

Carla Panciera has published two poetry collections, One of the Cimalores (Cider Press) and No Day, No Dusk, No Love (Bordighera Press). Her short story collection, Bewildered, received AWP’s Grace Paley Prize and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press. Her latest book is Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir (forthcoming from Loom Press). Panciera’s work has been featured in many journals including Poetry, New England Review, and Clackamas. She is the recipient of a Mass Cultural Council Grant in Creative Nonfiction and lives in Rowley, MA.

Ladies' Abecedary

by Arden Levine
(Harbor Editions, 2021) 

Reviewed by Jennifer Keith

Ladies’ Abecedary opens with two epigrams. The first is by Thomas Wentworth Higginson from his 1859 op-ed in The Atlantic. Higginson, alluding to an earlier “daring, keen, sarcastic” work by Sylvain Marchal, wonders if women learning the alphabet would grease the skids toward some unspeakable chaos. The second is a blood-tinged spit of lyric from Bikini Kill, a feminist punk band, about lives that can’t be spelled out in any traditional way. Ladies’ Abecedary draws from both energies. 

 

The polite title belies the deep dive of these poems into the real lives of girls and women. It’s rich territory for Levine, whose poems are like snapshots that suddenly extend into a third dimension when you hold them in your hand. “Abecedary” speaks to the structure of the book, each poem represents a piece in a sequence, with Levine titling poems with letters of the alphabet and arranging them in an order. 

 

But there’s more to those solitary glyphs announcing each poem. The letters are initials, substitutions for women’s names like you’d see in police reports, case studies. The poems are introductions to deeper narratives where the reader can fill in the details. From the excruciating-but-healing “tourniquets” applied by “A” to the metamorphosis of “Z”’s brokenness, the subject of each poem is a very particular female identity who lives, breathes, and takes up residence in the consciousness.

 

Two of the poems pair letters, so there are 24 poems altogether in Ladies’ Abecedary, a perfect circle of hours. The book is slim, modest in format, but many of the poems go surprisingly deep, and, taken together, put bright pins in a large map, hinting at the breadth of women’s experience. There’s a child who plays God and is answered by a parent bearing the brunt of being at her mercy. Two teen friends stride into their future with a new sense of physical power and purpose, while a pie baker’s failure and redemption hints at a private loss and acceptance.

 

Some of the poems’ subjects seem recognizable. “M” could be Marie Curie, who suffered public shame and xenophobia when, as a widow, she fell in love with a married man. “L” might well stand for Lilith, a personification of untamable sensuality and dangerous seduction. “U” is a homophone, directed at the reader, a terse warning of assuming 

 

1) that you can find the missing

either with maps or with technology. 

 

2) that words will keep you safe.

 

There is an “I” poem with these lines:

 

… She got

Levi’s blue jeans, too, and wise 

to how fast a girl can go 

when the fabric wraps around both legs.

 

But the “I” of first-person is absent in Abecedary. Whereas other women poets fall to the temptation of trying to define large swaths of women’s realities through their own thoughts and episodes, Levine creates a mosaic of the stories of other women and girls, some fanciful, some terrifying, some difficult, some triumphant—and all believable. Levine doesn’t have just one story about women; she has two dozen, and doesn’t attempt to shoe-horn them into fitting together in a tidy set. The ease with which Levine holds contrasting and conflicting truths reflects both depth and empathy. The poems are free in both content and form to grow and expand as individuals.

The poems dealing with physical vulnerability in Ladies’ Abecedary leave a particular mark. “R” takes on maternal mortality as erasing a fully formed human as well as the mother of a newborn. “E” moves in a circle from subservient calm to the horrors of medical invasion involving blood and the extraction of “a condition,” after which the poem itself, like E’s fingertips, forms a circuit and returns to baseline, emptied and still. What’s happened to E is horrific, but Levine’s control of the poem keeps the reader present and unblinking. 

 

Immediately afterward, “F,” the poem about the pie baker, also touches on blood-like destruction that hints at pregnancy loss. But the poem ends with its subject embracing the cycles that define women’s physical lives and their attendant agonies and hopes: 

 

And what did you do? they ask.

Roll dough. She places that reply so casually down,
as if she had described knocking over a cup of water in her sleep

and waking to find the floor already near dry; this, and not a story

of toil in making, toil in cleaning, toil in remaking, mourning loss.

 

“F” and the other heroines in Levine’s alphabet don’t dazzle with CGI superpowers. Instead, they endure with quiet dignity. “H” is a portrait of a lonely docent embracing (and embodying) the passage of time. In another way, the solitary exile in “N” abides and even nurtures another, finite form of life:

 

Here, they brought her

the last zinnia and some water 

to hold it for a day or two. 

After that, she will

hang it by its heels

so blood rushes to its head.

 

“K” is a longer poem that reads like a fairy tale. A phalanx of sisters moving as one unit, in height order, carry stones through the carnivorous snow of “a cold land” to test the firmness of the earth beneath their feet. 

 

Levine’s figures include women suffering and strictured by obsessions of mind and body. The fascinating “P”

 

can’t have any part of her 

body touching any other 

part of her body. It’s hard 

 

for more reasons that you’d expect. 

 

“S”’s pretty dress is also a “silken tourniquet”, and the echoing of words and phrases (“drumbeat,” “tongue,” “wings”) creates music while also speaking to the obsessive inner dialog and ritual of her disorder.

 

Several short entries in Ladies’ Abecedary introduce women who are not just at the mercy of nature but engaging with it, letting it inform them with a deeper awareness of how the world works. “O” is a chilling six-line metaphor on the occasional missteps of evolution, and the subject of “V” unwittingly conducts an experiment that shakes up both the cycle of time and the natural order that depends on it.

 

Women’s sexuality appears in the darkly seductive “L,” the bawdy, bouncing “Q” and the easy, watery bath of “W and X.” But the one that induces shivers is “T.” Levine uses white space to create two entities in the poem, bucket seats where “T” and her lover-or-abductor are riding together, their past in the rearview. The tension of the poem captures a breathless, burgeoning female sexuality, where danger and adventure are riding in the same car:

 

There is some place he took her from,    or some place
she left with him, perhaps
they were tossed out

of the sky, lost their lease on God.           So, El Camino
the drive, the unruly asphalt gardens, 
the tailpipe fumes

like a long exhale, the tapering 
of their history.

 

Higginson’s Atlantic essay, quoted in the book’s first epigram, ends with a suggestion: “First give woman, if you dare, the alphabet, then summon her to her career.” In Ladies’ Abecedary, Levine has used her alphabet and skill to create a haunting index of women’s anonymous, yet recognizable, lives. 

Jennifer Keith is a web content writer for Johns Hopkins Medicine. Her poems have appeared in Sewanee Theological Review, The Nebraska Review, The Free State Review, Fledgling Rag, Unsplendid, and elsewhere. Keith is the recipient of the 2014 John Elsberg poetry prize, and her poem 'Eating Walnuts' was selected by Sherman Alexie for inclusion in Best American Poetry 2015. In 2021 her poem “Cooper’s Hawk” was a finalist for the Erskine J. Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace and another poem received honorable mention in Passager’s poetry contest. She lives in Baltimore, MD.