Good Want reads as a road map through the wilderness of the suburbs. The homeward bound collection of poems lies, restlessly, between divine deliverance and blunt realness, serving as a careful witness to the small possibilities of suburban life. Going past the unhelpful road signs and visible limits of the pacifying predictability of suburbia, in a sweeping vision, the poems become a medium for personal revelations.
In Good Want, the speaker delves into the actual, recounting first-person memories, recollections, and nostalgia—all the little things that would otherwise slip into oblivion. . Combing through fragmented memories, widening out to larger ideas, before returning home, the speaker begins to question if what they really want is “dreams of pancakes in the morning before school” and “a dignified breed of family dog.”
Longing for some innate notions of virtuosity or goodness, the collection attempts to hack away at the trivialities of the every day – “I’m turning down the volume. I’m loosening the metaphor.” In a confessional mode of poetry, it asks what does one worship when nothing seems holy? “The lord’s house had no air conditioning.”, and do these inherited traditions speak for me? Yet, there is grace even in the silent company of prayers turned to irony and traditions turned obsolete- “ God, bless this strange bread. I accept the dough I’ve been given.”
Throughout the collection there is an indelible struggle between credulousness and agnosticism, salvation and isolation, what the speaker wants and what they get. There is an honest attempt to vindicate the antinomies that permeate throughout the collection, and stare into the space between them, unblinking. As the suburban promise begins to fade the lyrical poems turn confessional. The poems attempt to purify and repent with a persistent drive to shed one’s skin, as to summon a new one, and for the self and soul to emerge smooth and clean in a newfound sanctity.
“Good is what happens
when you stretch God too far.
And who am I
to eat margarine
in the dark cupboard
of my aliveness?”
Good Want is Domenica Martinello’s second collection of poetry, her first collection “All Day I Dream About Sirens”, was released in 2019, and both were brought to the public by Coach House Press. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop and won the Deena Davidson Friedman Prize for Poetry. She was a finalist for the 2017 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers.
