Books
Good Want
(Coach House Books, 2025)
What if poetry and prayer were the same: intimate and inconclusive, hopeful and useless, a private communion that hooks you to the thrashing, imperfect world?
“Good Want, a sustained ars poetica, interrogates its own interventions with aplomb.”
- Virginia Konchan,
The Poetry Foundation
“Martinello brings her singular wit and wonder to bear on the stakes of desire, never losing sight of the soft, the sweet, the sunburnt, the strange.”
- Bridget Huh,
Epoch
“A deceptively simple poem [that] asks us to reconsider the general, the generic even, as matter for meaningful refashionings.”
- The Malahat Review
Long Poem Prize Jury Citation
“As readers, we are never allowed to escape into the comfort of the abstract but are always smashed back into the earth, as though the poet is holding our faces to the dirt, to the flowers, to a sweaty armpit and telling us to breathe deeply. One of the most striking parts of Martinello’s work is how genuinely funny it is.”
- Katie Schmidt
Traces
“In a vicious act of rebellion, Domenica Martinello demolishes the delusions of this capitalist pastoral in Good Want.”
- Martin Breul,
Montreal Review of Books
“The poet oscillates between the sacred and the profane and has a playful time doing so. Oftentimes, the line between sacred as religion and sacred as poetry, or as an art form, blurs.”
- Manahil Bandukwala,
The Ampersand Review
“In this transformative space of Martinello’s wanting, desire and goodness chase each other in a cat-and-mouse game. Like the deconstruction of desire, the “good” in this collection is multidimensional; it indicates pleasure, morality, but also platitudes. The good is also the desirable, but Good Want questions whether desire itself is good.”
- Lillian Liao,
Room
“Martinello’s poems in Good Want offer an oratory, a lyric less of performance than as preached from only slightly above, writing her sharp strikes, crafted lines and disorienting wisdoms clear-eyed and gestural; hers is a craft that is obvious, of carved and burnished steel.”
- rob mclennan,
The Woodlot
“All is laid bare
in this stunning collection,
best read on a sweltering day by the canal when there’s nothing else to do but contemplate.”
- Sruti Islam
Cult MTL
“The homeward bound collection of poems lies, restlessly, between divine deliverance and blunt realness… In a confessional mode of poetry, it asks what does one worship when nothing seems holy?”
- Samuel Wise,
Montreal Guardian
Asleep I flick and lash
the air from memory
and face the forked
path like an old enemy
before eating my own tail.
“I Pray to the Pale Fire”
All Day I Dream About Sirens
(Coach House Books, 2019)
A lyric drift through siren myth, capitalism, and the female body’s long entanglement with both.
“Martinello evaluates the siren as an object of both fantasy and horror, adopting the voices of mermaids from Homer to Starbucks to examine branding, embodiment, and personal identity under capitalism. Her poems read like a contemporary Greek chorus, proffering up trees and tides and gasps through an enviable command of lyric and form.”
- Nikki Shaner-Bradford,
The Paris Review
“Rich with myth, pop culture, and feminism, [this] is a striking debut that offers a clarion call for many women.”
- Shazi Hafiz Ramji
Quill & Quire
“An intoxicating debut... [Martinello’s] poems are dazzling, exhilarating.”
- Eduardo C. Corral,
Electric Literature
“[This] is a shrewd epic that shimmies up and down the scales from highbrow to lowbrow. [Martinello] sharpens her teeth on tradition, wields tone like an axe, and carves space for unheard voices to emerge from the chorus. This poet harnesses the ethereal quality of digital and classical realms while her poems explode with fury and grace.”
— 2017 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award jury
(Adèle Barclay, Stuart Ross, and Moez Surani)
“[Martinello] recasts the image of the siren in her debut collection, a brash, slyly subversive romp through mythology, folklore and pop culture.”
- The Toronto Star
“In its expansive net-casting... the book is a catalogue of fish-women, and Martinello’s take on the catalogue or list is refreshing. She excels, not just at lists, exactly, but in crafty parallelism creating extended list-like forms.”
- K.I. Press
Arc Poetry Magazine
“[Martinello’s] collection is a virtuosic essay at how to pick up the lyre as a poet lettered in the Western tradition... The book works as one long brilliant subtweet to the Orphic tradition... as she reinstates sirens’ powerful knowledge to its true position to strike terror into entitled men’s hearts.”
- Sonnet L’Abbé,
The Ex-Puritan
“ADIDAS is also a formally experimental collection... often fragmenting syntax into language that mirrors the stereotypical reduction of the female body to its anatomical parts.”
- Klara du Plessis,
The Montreal Review of Books
Like a mishandled mythology skewered
shadowless on a bedpost, still I trail
my stubborn dust.
“Virginia’s Moth”