The Friends of the Concord Free Public Library present
Poetry At The Library
Jonathan Aaron & Jennifer Martelli
Two outstanding poets at the height of their powers
Sunday, October 19
3:00 PM
Goodwin Forum
Concord Free Public Library, 129 Main St.
Join us for an in-person afternoon with award-winning poets Jonathan Aaron and Jennifer Martelli who will read and engage in a Q & A about their inspirations and craft.
CFA 2025 POETRY PANELISTS
Jonathan aaron
Jonathan Aaron is the author of three previous books of poems, including Second Sight, Corridor, and Journey to the Lost City. His work has received many honors, including fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell. His poems have appeared in the London Review of Books, The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and Raritan, among others, and they have been included five times in Best American Poetry.
Jonathan was educated at the University of Chicago and Yale. He went on to teach English and Creative Writing at Williams College, at Yale, in Harvard’s Expository Writing Program, and finally in the Department of Writing and Literature at Emerson College, where he is now professor emeritus. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Jonathan Aaron
ABOUT JUST ABOUT ANYTHING: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS
Jonathan Aaron reads from his fourth collection, Just About Anything: New and Selected Poems (Carnegie Mellon University Press 2025).
“A poem uses words to try to get at what can’t be put into words. The best poems remain just out of reach; something in or about them remains mysterious. A poem itself is an inquiry or a search, that is never finished, never fulfilled.”
On Poetry and the Reader
"I've always loved stories--not just `literature,' but personal and historical anecdotes, myths, parables, jokes, rumors, weird news items, the movies. Maybe that's why my poems are basically narrative in character and intent. Long or short, elaborate or plain, they aim to convey in terms of incident or description some kind of information that the reader can make something of. "
“Jonathan Aaron is the master of the noir fable. Ranging from the darkly humorous to the elegiac, the poems in Just About Anything both show and recount how the ordinary can slip at any moment into the unsteady worlds of legend and dream: A dog advises her master to read Solzhenitsyn; a landlady’s husband turns into a giant snake; a man time-travels to tell Bach about the future. Aaron’s haunting collection leads us to places where we experience ourselves––suddenly and unpredictably––’more truly and more strange.”
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
“In Just About Anything, Jonathan Aaron invites us into a world unlike any other––a place of dark wonders and strange delights, where even the sunniest landscapes can hold mystery and muted menace. In one poem Nikolai Gogol ruins a stew, in another the Invisible Man riffles the pages of a book, in yet another a man bows to the wisdom of a magic horse. Such moments seem natural in the alternate realities these poems explore. And beyond such uneasy fun, a series of powerful love poems reveals the depth of feeling that underlies the inventiveness of this superb collection.”
Jennifer martelli
Jennifer Martelli has received fellowships from The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Monson Arts, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Poetry, Best of the Net Anthology, Braving the Body Anthology, Verse Daily, Plume, The Tahoma Literary Review, Diode, and elsewhere. She is the author of Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree, The Queen of Queens, which won the Italian American Studies Association Book Award and was shortlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award, and My Tarantella, which was also shortlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award and named finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. She is the author of the chapbooks All Things are Born to
Change Their Shapes, In the Year of Ferraro, and After Bird. Jennifer Martelli is co-poetry editor for MER. www.jennmartelli.com
Jennifer Martelli
ABOUT PSYCHIC PARTY UNDER THE BOTTLE TREE
“In this striking collection of poems, Jennifer Martelli delves deep into the human psyche, exploring themes of desire, self-destruction, and the complexities of human existence. From suffocation to snakes, moon jellyfish to Marcia Brady, Martelli’s Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree fearlessly confronts the layers of anxiety that shroud our lives, leaving us spellbound with her poignant observations. Through vivid imagery and visceral language, she invites readers to confront their own anxieties, exploring the intricate emotions that shape our perceptions of the world. Brava to this skilled and necessary poet! This is the book we have been waiting for.”
- January Gill O’Neil, author of Glitter Road
“Jennifer Martelli wields tarot and horoscope and navigates Shakespeare, Gospel, Sylvia Plath, and Twitter as she confronts mythologies of selfhood, recovery, girlhood, and motherhood. “Believe me when I say I’m good,” she dares us, as she leads us up trees, onto trains, and into landscapes of night, memory, and suburbia in “one smooth forward swallow.” These are poems of unease and resistance that nonetheless comfort us with the clarity and humor of their song and the warmth of their gaze. ”
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
“…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.” ”