Jennifer Martelli is a graduate of Boston University and the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program for Writers. Her work has appeared in The Denver Quarterly, Calliope, Folio, The Bellingham Review, The Mississippi Review, Kalliope and the anthology Outsiders, Poems about Exiles, Rebels and Renegades. A recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant for Poetry, she was raised in Revere, Massachusetts and lives in Marblehead with her husband and two children.
Reviews
“These are fearless, well-crafted poems that dare to question and explore motherhood, nature, God, and marriage. Jennifer Martelli's poetry is: 'like a visitor stamping his feet on my porch.' Apostrophe will show up at your door and make you pay attention.”
Maureen A. Sherbondy Praying at Coffee Shops, After the Fairy Tale
“These poems by Jennifer Martelli are full of arrows and God, love, loss and desire. So much heartache in one collection ought to be against the law. Or it should be the law. No book has moved me this deeply in a very long time. Her voice is honest and clear, and her vision is unflinching. This is what poetry should be, this brutal beauty.“
Crystal Bacon Elegy with a Glass of Whiskey
“Apostrophe is a fiercely—vulnerable collection of unapologetic lyrics and bastard forms obsessed with tracking the texture and potency of gazes between 'you and I.' Of course we readers are aligned with the other, with the addressed, in what Martellli has shaped into apostrophes or digressive turnings to discourse: 'And so, let’s have a staring contest,' she writes, challenging reader, lover, God, addiction, passerby. She stares back from the sometime warmth of her familial present, into the familiar serration of past—one rife with snakes, junkies, and gendered tugs of war. That past has hooked her violently and she will not look away. Does that mean she ‘wins’ the staring contest? I don’t know. But readers can’t lose by staring square into this raw and worthy debut.”
Jennifer Jean In the War
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