Review by Christy Lee Barnes
In Jennifer Martelli’s Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree, an atheist’s prayers conjure up snakes and possums.
Snakes, her deepest fear. And a possum, whose “deep blue / milk, lets her babies / cling to her opalescent / pelt warm and lunar.”
I open with that image to give a glimpse into the wonderfully fierce strangeness of this collection. Again and again, the poems pull readers into a sharp, surprising, and ultimately beautiful world, past the ordinary and down to a weirder land full of honesty, pain, humor, and strength. In her concise, gripping poems, Martelli grapples with past addiction and hard-won sobriety, her past Catholicism and her chosen atheism, her primal fears (snakes show up again and again), recurring dreams, relationships, societal expectations, and motherhood.
Martelli faces all these thorny topics with a practiced hand, tackling the subject of fear with confident bravery. In “Night Snake” she writes:
Anything I’ve ever feared
regenerated, came
around on the wheel St. Catherine-
like, moon-
sure, rose
from the wet
humus in my heart.
Often, it is the tremendous energy of her diction that elevates, as in “Hot Things to Me Are Not Dark.” The language here grips and holds the reader with its cadence and intensity:
When I had my daughter, my fears were lonely: I unzippered them
as if they were cattails by the pond where the snakes go. Unzippered their whole
velvet torsos, their tight girdles, let loose fear fear fear into the warm autumn sky.
Then, in “Stone-Colored Birds,” printed sideways on the page near the middle of the collection, she takes a different tack. A heavy moment is captured in stark, clear, language. She starts with a matter-of-fact description of what she sees while taking a walk:
I’ve always lived by the shore and this one has a stone circle to mark the sun
and it’s surrounded by squat pink roses and sea grass, empty Seagram’s.
As she walks she mulls over a painful situation for her daughter:
In a pair of my daughter’s jeans (washed and washed again, packed away for Goodwill),
I found old gum deep in the pocket and a tiny note folded so hard, the blue ink barely blurred: I’m friends with mean girls and I feel like I’m drowning.
The direct, simple language she uses in “Stone-Colored Birds” captures her emotional landscape, bringing the reader into the experience.
Near the middle of the collection, in “Sobriety,” she considers a snake on the sidewalk with a broken back, but, as the title hints, she considers more than just that:
The snake
dragged itself from one bush to the other—
the juniper not yet ginned up.
I fear snakes and I fear my children
being lonely, as I am lonely.
And here, as in many of the poems, there is a sense that she is fighting to remove anything but the truth, just as she has removed a faith she couldn’t fully believe, meat from her diet, habits and addictions that did not serve her.
Still, her fight to honor her truth does not keep her from exploring mystery. Dreams are a common motif in the collection, and even ordinary experiences and memories often veer and dip into the surreal, as in “Vision Test in the First Grade,” which considers the memory of being asked to identify an picture of an apple on a picnic table:
What if I saw, on that same table, against the endless night in that box,
an amber pear, lit from within its skin? What if I saw a plum,
dark as that midnight picnic, but new-moon illuminated?
What would my teacher mark in her green book?
And the poem for which the collection is titled, “Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree,” presents a dream-like, evocative interior landscape: the speaker is folded into a green glass bottle dangling from a tree, a psychic is divining below, and memories from childhood flicker through: “In the summer, we ate ice cream out of cups with flat wood / spoons. I licked the sweet chocolate and vanilla swirl so hard / I got splinters in my tongue.”
The surreal, lush poem brings Lorca to mind. And although mysterious, the hazy dreamscape of this poem also feels very true, the way vivid dreams often do.
The poems slip between the surreal and the mundane with skill and also with humor—it would be wrong to end this review without a nod toward the humor throughout the book, such as these lines: “I’m doing what the New York Times calls languishing / and I’ll do it until noon, playing Words Without Friends on my phone.” As well as poem titles like “400 Calories of Existential Horror” and “I Crocheted a Uterus, But Not Because I Tried.”
In Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree, Martelli’s sharp, unflinching poetry invites each of us to face down our own fears, failures, and losses. Perhaps, if we look hard enough, we will find something strange and wild and beautiful, too.
Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree by Jennifer Martelli
Lily Poetry Review Books, December 2024
ISBN 978-1957755427
Christy Lee Barnes is an educator originally from Los Angeles who now lives in Seattle with her husband and toddler son. Her writing can be found in Prairie Schooner, Plume, Cream City Review, Cagibi, Spillway, The Comstock Review, Tin House’s “Broadside Thirty,” The Seattle Times, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, Commodore Rookery, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.