The Brooklyn Rail

T. S. Eliot’s classic theory of impersonality famously demands for objectivity in achieving the highest form of poetic expression. A lens of detachment, alchemized through both an extrication from and a synthesis of one’s feelings and experiences, allows for the clear-eyed scrutiny necessary to examine universal concepts with nuance and precision. If the “emotion of art is impersonal,” as Eliot has argued, then it is also that very impartiality that renders access to certain intimacies and knowledge, made lucid only through enough time and distance.

Tempered by this perspective, the brilliant, hypnotic poems of Jennifer Martelli’s Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree examine the complicated emotional landscapes involved in the long-term recovery from substance abuse. The vulnerability inherent in navigating sobriety is one frequently addressed throughout these poems, such as in “Blades,” where the speaker remarks:

Long ago
I sobered up, more than half my life has been spent on the tip of that blade,
bending as far as I can from the point.

The nature of recovery, its subtle fragility, even after decades of abstinence, seems to dance on a razor’s edge. Martelli unearths those complexities at play, so often rooted deep in the subconscious, where they are brought under a cold and exacting light. In doing so, the sixty poems in Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree traverse a vast range of topics, weaving together themes of motherhood, politics and war, violence against women, the corrosive forces of envy and self-destruction, recurring images of snakes, the care and demise of elderly parents, Tarot and mythology, girlhood and pop culture, Shakespeare and Rilke, Twitter memes, and meditations on nature and faith. Martelli’s poems are wholly absorbing, discursive and far-reaching in their innovation and intellect, recalling the glittering voices of Diane Seuss, Kaveh Akbar, and Marie Howe.

Though peripatetic in subject matter, the focus of this work seldom strays from examining the psychological underpinnings that pulse at the heart of addiction and sobriety. In “Doc Martens 1460 Wild Botanica,” the speaker’s obsessive fixation on acquiring a pair of boots becomes a sudden desire for nicotine: “I want to smoke again and feel that hot toxin sting the bony roof of my mouth / … Here is the truth of these boots: / I want you to think they’re pretty, get close to me, believe me when I say I’m good.”

Addiction transference appears in other poems, revealing a restless state of wanting powerful enough to stalk one’s very dreams. In “Tarot in a Nicotine Dream,” the speaker smokes under a bridge while pulling Tarot cards with a friend, but even in that unconscious dream state, her guilt over smoking is palpable. “At least it wasn’t booze,” she confides to the reader.

Nightmares blur into waking life, and anxieties run deep. In “Moon Jellyfish,” the speaker, upon walking by a beach at dusk, discovers hundreds of the invertebrates along the shore, “left strewn all over the mud: clear sandy blobs, half-globe sadnesses.” Though another woman paddles her board nearby, she fails to hear the speaker’s cries of warning. The speaker, in her failure to be heard, realizes, “this was my old drunk nightmare but I wasn’t sure who else knew. / The boozy boats moored, bobbing? The woman, rowing, hair pulled up and clasped?”

Images of snakes also populate many of these poems, emerging first as a threat and later as a mercy. In “Is there anything under that layer?” the speaker confesses:

I fear suffocation and snakes and bridges and the penis,
But mostly I don’t want to be disregarded. That’s the fear.
I’m wrapped in snakeskin and cloth and cold, thick
iron: it’s heavy, and I’m left, I’m just left.

Throughout other poems, snakes reappear in various forms, sometimes across the night sky among constellations, other times as exposed plant roots or even as live wires after a storm, “still dangerous though dead.” Snakes become trains, such as in “The Way This Acela Train Eats.” As the speaker watches a video of a python “swallowing a brown fawn whole … down the length of the baby deer,” the snake “slides with its reticulated muscle the way this Acela train / eats the tracks through Connecticut: one smooth forward swallow.” Language defamiliarizes what is ordinary, opening the possibility for anything to be transformed.

In “Growing Out My Bangs,” the speaker, crossing the street, is suddenly relieved of her old fears. Only when she glances back does she realize why. Her physical self has been transformed, discarded in a snakelike fashion:

I turned to see my poor old body pooled,
on the sidewalk, like a dress I’d stepped out of and left
for next morning to wash.
So I figured I was dead, had died minutes ago, but hadn’t been told.
Shame.

Similar events occur elsewhere in the collection, suggesting the transformative nature of long-term recovery, the quotidian effort it takes to maintain sobriety through a process of constant renewal. Indeed, the very meaning of recovery, taken from the Anglo-French, means to regain consciousness. The poems in this collection often involve speakers who are continuously regaining perspective, and even a sense of faith, that allows them to come back from the brink of despair. Meditations on spirituality and prayer are frequent, complicated by the agnostic speaker’s own unresolved ties to Roman Catholicism. In “Waiting for My Son at Midnight by the Church at the Edge of the Small Woods Where the Kids Get Stoned,” the speaker meditates upon several stained-glass windows still alight at such a dark hour. She remarks how:

A long time ago, I prayed for sobriety, but what I meant was
don’t let me be lonely. Even when I stopped believing in God,
I prayed my kids would never feel as I do.

Perhaps one of the most heart-wrenching poems in the collection is “Sandy’s Electric Griddle,” where the speaker is haunted by the words of a friend from her recovery group, long after his untimely death:

he believed we’re always moving forward, even,
he said, if we use again, we’re still going in the right direction.
Do you believe you have a soul? Do you believe it’s always moving forward?

Such questions, turned back upon the reader, are penetrating in the reflection they offer. Written with unflinching clarity, the poems of Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree are soul sustaining not only for their vision, but also through the depth and intimacy of their compassion.