An Everyday Genius: Remembering Jennifer Martelli

Essays in the “Remembrances” series pay tribute to poets who have died in the past year.

The last thing Jennifer Martelli wrote was her own obituary. Anyone who knew Jenn knew it couldn’t have been written by anyone else. This line was the giveaway: “She was also devoted to progressive causes and cannot believe that this thing in the White House has outlived her.”

Jennifer passed away from pancreatic cancer on September 25, 2025, surrounded by family, in her home. The last time I heard from her was the Tuesday before. To our longtime text chain of poets—Cindy Veach, Jennifer Jean, and me—she wrote, “Love you all.” Two days before that, she was canceling readings and finding replacements, including for a reading we were planning to do together at Chapter & Verse, a Boston-area poetry series, on October 17. She’d never leave anyone in a lurch.

Jenn was truly an “everyday genius,” a technician of the line, with an ear tuned to music and emotional precision. Her poems carried the weight of history while also taking leaps of imagination, and she was equally at home in the sonnet and in Jericho Brown’s duplex form. She loved spondees and slant rhymes, sound married to sense. To read her was to enter a world both intimate and dangerous, a space where tenderness and rage met on the page.

Jenn’s influences ran deep and wide; she drew as much from Sylvia Plath’s Bee Sequence as from Madonna’s electric stage presence at the 1984 MTV Awards. She was also shaped by the politics of Geraldine Ferraro and Shirley Chisholm, the cultural shifts of the 1970s and ’80s, and her Italian American upbringing. In her poems, she interrogated the contradictions of that heritage, celebrating its richness while exposing its patriarchal and conservative undercurrents. “Bodily autonomy—and not having it—is a trigger for me,” she once wrote, a conviction that pulsed through much of her work.

Though outraged by the political climate, especially its decay on women’s rights, Jenn refused to let anger dampen her lust for life. She was cool. Wicked funny. Acerbic. She channeled fury into art and action, unwavering in her vision and meticulous in her craft. A former high school English teacher, she never let me get away with a grammar slip, and I loved her for it. She was one of the few people I trusted with my poetry. Above all, she was devoted to community, showing up for everyone to readings, launches, open mics, protests. A dedicated literary citizen, she served as poetry coeditor for MER (Mom Egg Review) and was known for her generosity in writing blurbs, reviews, and critiques for poets.

She loved cats, especially her beloved Maria. She feared bridges and needed someone else to drive her across them. She showed up to every coffee shop with her own Starbucks in a travel mug, then bought another coffee anyway. She adored her family—her husband, Vinnie, and their children, Mia and Michael—and was their fiercest supporter.

Leave it to Jenn to leave The Thursday Poets on a Thursday. The Thursday Poets is a Salem-based collective of writers who gather to create, promote, and celebrate poetry north of Boston. For three years, Jenn was a cofounder and leading member, helping to run a poetry reading series in Lynn, Massachusetts, with Kathi Aguero and me. She was one of the group’s animating spirits: steadfast, funny, devoted to language, and generous to those around her. But her reach extended far beyond greater Boston.

Over 15 years, Jenn built a body of work that feels both intimate and expansive. She published four full-length collections and four chapbooks, most recently Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2024), longlisted for a Massachusetts Book Award; The Queen of Queens (Bordighera Press, 2022); My Tarantella (Bordighera Press, 2018); and The Uncanny Valley (Big Table Publishing, 2016). Her poems were unafraid of the political. She wrote about Italian American identity, class, gender, and the bodies we inherit and inhabit.

Jenn and Vincent lived in Cambridge from 1990 to 1996, when the poetry scene thrived. Marie Howe, Lucie Brock-Broido, and Mary Karr were teaching informal workshops out of their homes. Jenn joined one of Marie’s classes: six weeks for a hundred dollars, advertised on a flier taped to the Grolier Poetry Book Shop’s window. They were “ruthless and honest and loving,” Jenn said later.

I met Jenn 10 years later at the Salem Writers Group, a longtime group for all genres run by Salem’s first poet laureate, J.D. Scrimgeour. I can still see her sitting across the table from me, laser-focused on a poem’s trouble spots. She had a gift for figuring out what was wrong and offering simple fixes that never made you feel less than. She made you better without making you sound like anyone but yourself. Over the years, that generosity became something I depended on—not just as a poet, but as a friend.

Jenn’s first collection, The Uncanny Valley (2016), traces her life’s journey from her childhood in Revere, Massachusetts, all through middle age, reflecting on love, marriage, and the process of finding one’s way in the world. In the prose poem “The Devil Tides,” she writes: 

If you are born up here, you know sadness and you know gulls. You know how a good clamshell makes a good ashtray. You know the land is as flat as any place where men change into wolves under the mutton moon. You know that.

Years later, she collaborated with poet Kevin Carey and photographer Stephenie Young on Revere Beach Stories (2025), an ekphrastic project pairing poems with Young’s photographs of the three-mile beachfront where Jenn grew up. It was a love letter to Revere—honest, unsentimental, and rooted in place. Jenn loved a good beach day in the sun. From her poem “Tongue Root”:

I have always lived by the ocean. When I was a child, I built my altar at low-tide on Revere Beach. I made a pentacle with:

1. a small, suede fringe pouch I stole from one sister with my other sister’s doll tucked inside
2. the blue plastic pirate sword I pulled from the heart of a Maraschino cherry
3. grandpa’s skeleton key I found dangling from a hook on grandma’s stove
4. from my mother’s pocket, the book of matches from The General Edward’s Inn
5. my father’s tarnished brass tie pin with an embossed tiny White House.

What I conjured then, I live with now. I conjured women nobody heard.

My Tarantella (2018) confronts the Kitty Genovese murder and other violences that shadow our collective memory. It is both elegy and reckoning, survival and defiance. True to its title, the book unfolds like a dance, with grief transformed into movement to make sense of the senseless.

With The Queen of Queens (2022), Jenn came into her full power, with poems that invoke Geraldine Ferraro, Madonna, Nancy Pelosi, and Molly Ringwald, among other influential figures, and embody resistance to gender oppression in its many manifestations. Pearls, a familiar feminine symbol, recur throughout the collection, beginning with the list poem “16 Reasons Why I Became a Gray Pearl.”

1. I grew tired of being a grain of irritation in the world’s soft mouth.
2. Thought I’d be a moon floating in a cloudy afternoon sky.
3. Being asexual, I craved bondage.
4. Craved four gold prongs to hold me in place on a band for the left ring finger.
5. Needed to backhand someone right on the mouth.

Jenn was sober for more than 36 years, a commitment she treated with reverence. She cared for her friends in recovery and was as close to them as any other community. The final full-length book published in her lifetime, Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree (2024), explores long-term recovery—its dailiness, its mystery—and is perhaps her most personal work.

The poems in this collection explore the layers of anxiety that shroud our lives, inviting readers to face their own fears through vivid imagery and visceral language. From her poem “Moon Jellyfish”:

One jellyfish lay like a broken Magic 8 ball: too hazy to tell.

One had black sand dried into a small V, like the back of a pixie cut

or a soul patch, shaved & groomed, a mound shorn to please: sexy & so plump.

One fit into a bra, balanced breasts. One missed the wave, couldn’t get home.

Jenn’s poems drew power from contradiction: ferocity held in lyric restraint, grief braided with humor, the sacred brushing against the profane. “Plath will always be an inspiration,” she once said. “The queen bee in ‘Relinquishing’ is left alone, abandoned—oh, so Sylvia Plath! [Her] Bee Sequence will always be one of the most incredible examples of horror poetry: the anger, the grief, the menace.” Like Plath, Jenn could write from the center of intensity without losing control of the craft that carried it.

When the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Jenn went from the protest line to the page and wrote her chapbook Dear Justice. Those poems became the backbone of an unpublished manuscript, Dear America. Another unpublished manuscript, In the Motherhouse, is an ekphrastic response to the 2018 horror film Suspiria. Influenced by Dorothea Lasky’s The Shining (Wave Books, 2023), the project is beautifully, weirdly Jenn.

Jenn and I often texted about the latest political absurdity—her replies were quick, cutting, and fucking hilarious. “Did you see what this fool did?” I’d send. Seconds later, her message would return, sharper than any headline. That same clarity lived in her poems, where outrage met empathy and imagination.

The world is quieter without her, but those of us who wrote and worked beside her are stronger for having known her. Jennifer Martelli was a poet of precision, wit, and deep compassion, remembered for her art, mentorship, humor, and faith in poetry’s power to connect and heal. She made us braver. She made me a better person.

From her poem “Land Masses”:

Think about it: you’ve lost people, there was a last time, and

I’m not talking about death. They’re still there, apart. Maybe in sleep,

I’m trying to hold onto something. I’ve never wondered

how much time I have left, but how far back, how deep, how long

have I been separating. From you. From my body. From the land.

I believe—and there’s no science to back this up—on the last day

the giant land masses touched, horses galloped up and down unhooked

coasts under the moon. Some horses were roan. Some gold.