A Review of Jennifer Martelli’s The Queen of Queens — October 24, 2022 by Arden Levine
Jennifer Martelli’s poem “In the Year of Ferraro” includes an epigraph from Marie C. Wilson, founder of The White House Project: “To not see your personage reflected in politics is a pain.” The personage here is American women, their pain is not necessarily metaphorical, and the opacity of that reflection is (as Martelli reveals) by design. In response to that marred view, “the dark pupil dilates and constricts, pulls tight and shut: / nothing that goes in can leave or ever come back.”
In Martelli’s book, The Queen of Queens, the fulcrum year is 1984; there’s an election on, and Martelli (a clear-eyed pupil of contemporary U.S. history) has assembled a collection/convention with celebrity appearances by Madonna and Molly Ringwald, Tears for Fears and Talking Heads. Atop the podium is Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro, the titular regina, lustrous in pearls and political anointment, a new star. Yet here, too, courtesy of Martelli, is the hall of mirrors: the press that misquotes Ferraro (see: “He Is My Man / He Is My Tomato”), the future First Lady Barbara Bush who openly insults her (see also: “Rhymes, Slant and Otherwise”), even the elderly “Aunt Olga Argenzio” who “didn’t believe women should be ordained” (not even, it is implied, this queen).
With spare, gutting lines that blend political textbook and prayer book, Martelli’s poems paint Ferraro in a devotional style, her reflection shining from pieces of a freshly-broken (stained-)glass ceiling: she is the salvation of liberal female voters, but the OG Italian-American community senses a false icon, altering her image with their cultural projections. Little wonder, then, that the only poem in Ferraro’s own voice is this brief, fragmented erasure of her acceptance speech for the Vice Presidential nomination:
Ladies and gentleman: My name is
(not)
that
American
woman
(not) our own
sister
daughter mother (not)
you.
Yet The Queen of Queens is not a biography-in-verse of Geraldine Ferraro so much as it is a historiography-in-stanzas of the experience of womanhood in the 1980s, for which Ferraro is a tragic heroine/synecdoche and Martelli is a participant/observer/survivor. And those ubiquitous mirrors flash up relentlessly in Martelli’s own face. She first installs that set-piece in the book’s third poem “from Jezebel: ‘Map: Six Decades of the Most Popular Name for Girls, State by State,’” a tiny portrait of a girl/place/era:
On Romper Room, another Jennifer emerged from Miss Jean’s Magic Mirror…
As a meta-poem, this would be like a shattered mirror. Here is Miss Jean saying, And I see Jennifer. There’s Donovan singing Jennifer Juniper. This is my sixth-grade project on leukemia. This is where I lived: among lawn statues of Mary, Queen of the Universe.
Jennifer began to eat the Marys, the Lisas off the map of green and gray state names— Jennifer flooded the map with bright blood red. The whole country on the Jezebel map red, red as a Republican electorate.
As Martelli and her Bostonian Catholic friends come into their political and sexual awareness, wearing their crucifixes and Ray-Bans, those distorted mirrors are variously covered in cocaine, pixelated into disco balls. In “Oracular,” Nancy Reagan wears “cut glass mirror beads on her de la Renta sheath… refracted light”; First Lady Nancy, Martelli glibly notes, loved “her little body all wrapped in red.” Red like in that soaked map, or Martelli’s blood rituals (menstruation then abortions) recounted in “When Was My Anger Conceived?,” the pain of politics made literal. (So, no, this primary document is not casually anodyne; Martelli gets red in the face too. More on that.)
Only Ferraro provides these young women with their latter-day Miss Jean’s Magic Mirror, the balm to Wilson’s described pain. Yet as quickly as Our Lady ascends, she is brought low. “Watching Clips of the Democratic National Convention, July 19, 1984” has Ferraro begin with the gravitational pull of a celestial/nurturing body…
Pearls encircle Geraldine Ferraro like tiny moons around a mother earth. Pearls created from mother of pearl, protective: that iridescent layer, the hard luminescent surface inside the hinged shell.
…and end as a mere stone cast out of our solar system maps:
All the women reach their arms up to her, wave and reach as if offered open-handed a merciful pearl, a grace, one time, then snatched back and slapped shut.
The Queen of Queens is spangled with stars and constellations, Me Generation fad astrology orbiting old-world strega wisdom. This imagery culminates in the collection’s second-to-last poem, “The Challenger, January 28, 1986,” a startling extended metaphor of a political fall, in which President Ronald Reagan “assures” a breathless and traumatized audience
that the future doesn’t belong
to the fainthearted… it belongs to the brave. I will meet it with joy. Maybe he didn’t know, couldn’t tell us
they were alive in that ship alive for the slow arcing high in the blue sky alive for the long descent to the ocean rushing
up to meet them.
Many years after Ferraro’s defeat, and with a couple of years yet before the reversal of Roe v. Wade made the upcoming midterm election even more consequential for American women, Martelli is righteously pissed: In the course of the book, she becomes the Jennifer who wants to eat that red electoral map herself, who has blood coming out of her eyes and her whatever, who is watching in horror as America loses altitude in the decreasingly-blue sky and drops into a not-blue wave. And in “Why I Began Writing About Vice Presidential Candidate Geraldine Ferraro,” she makes no bones about her choice to be a poet-witness to this history: “Everything then / is happening again: back in the ‘80s, a rich man / raped his wife, and now I have to look at his face every day.” Which explains why, in “Yesterday I Was So Angry, I Broke Things With My Mind,” she finally, painfully, shatters everything in which she might see herself:
lay in fat white pieces, thick as oyster shells, the brokenness capturing light like a poem about the moon or the moon’s
memory of tide. I’ve been angry for so long. Or maybe just afraid of not really being here: parts of me in pieces…
Cleaning it up was the hardest: its skinny pieces reflected blue and cold, and hungry, like a mirror.
Nevertheless, the poems persist in being at turns hopeful, even humorous. Like the invisible ink of ‘80s children’s games or political spy movies, The Queen of Queens has an exquisite set of subtexts and winks: One poem (“Vanquished”) follows Martelli to MoMA to see racy Russian-themed artwork; the next poem (“Honeymoon During the Reagan Administration”) watches her get it on in a freezing fort because “there were no wars anymore.” (Except, of course, the Cold/cold ones. Well-played.)
Far less subtle are the pearls (of wisdom, of womanhood) that roll over almost every poem in the collection: They retain sweat, they throttle; they adorn rosaries, caskets, Nancy Pelosi’s garments, mom’s handbag and the handles of guns; they are tampons and ova; refuse in a whale’s belly and in the belly of God; even the “red pearl crown” of the coronavirus (which “was a woman who has been ignored for too long”). They are “five decades of luminescent spit” held to Martelli’s breast like, yes, spit. They are legion, many million Botticelli Venuses, all “tired of being a grain of sand in the world’s soft palate,” negotiating permanent exits from their shells, demanding an intact, reflective surface that shows them whole.
