All Things Are Born to Change Their Shapes

(By Jennifer Martelli)

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Author	Jennifer Martelli

“Book Descriptions: What we are reminded of in Jennifer Martelli’s All Things Are Born to Change Their Shapes is that women have been mythologized as a means to control, and, therefore, it is best to lean into this mythology and adopt the guise of the witch we are so often accused of being, or risk eclipse. There is power in that magic as Martelli demonstrates with these talismanic poems of fauna, flora, and monstrous women. Martelli has built a world for us, and in that world—haunted by the ghosts of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton—fog slinks through the trees, and among those trees the women either shapeshift, or they perish.

—Sonia Greenfield, Author of Letdown

The poems in All Things Are Born to Change Their Shapes are sharp as “bone blades,” electric as “live wires,” their lines unfolding like “rind pared off with a sharp knife into a perfect coil.” Mythical and literary figures roam the pages as so much more than symbols or ghosts—they are fused with the brutality and beauty of culture and social consciousness, here to give shape to the present moment. While Martelli spells the reader with images of talons, owls, skeletons, and snakes, she also notes, “A poem is not a list of pretty things.” After reading this collection, one would not dare to reduce these poems into something as frail as “pretty”— they are instead gigantic, powerful, and unflinching. I could not look away, nor did I want to.

—Megan Merchant, author of Before the Fevered Snow

The poems in Jennifer Martelli’s All Things Are Born to Change Their Shapes are elemental, allegorical, imaginative, shape-shifting, and brave. She begins the book with instructions and a spell of protection, a digging down for a walling out: a moat. And the poems make their own castle, sarcophagus, owl pellet. They are occupied with what cleaves and is cloven. They are of sex, and blood, and bodies, and bones, and violence visited upon women, from Grecian punishments, to The Handmaid’s Tale, to Polanski, to Hillary Clinton. They ghost, moon, haunt, and Ouija. Martelli has a whale-sized mind, generous and expansive. Her work is sacred and profane as Mary’s bathtub half-shell, resilient as the beating heart of Joan of Arc after her burning. This poet knows trees are magic witches and rhubarb wears crowns. How a snake is born from “your friend’s arm in a black Danskin holding out a Granny Smith apple.” I want to say I think of Lucie Brock-Broido, of Brigit Pegeen Kelly, of Sexton and of Plath. And these giants walk through her poems, it’s true, but in the end there is such astonishing originality in Martelli’s lines that she crowds out all associations with her brilliance.

—Rebecca Hart Olander, editor/director of Perugia Press & author of Uncertain Acrobats”