martinez pompa

Domestic Corpse is an ode to darkness and to the longing that rivers through it. Under the penetrating eye of capitalism, Martinez Pompa’s poems sift through the wreckage of mental illness, failed marriage, the quick-fix pharmaceutical industry, and fragmented identities piecing themselves together between the illusion of upward mobility and the void of the American dreamscape. The poems pull directly from the source of transgenerational trauma, but the dirge within them is haunted by hope. Violence is countered by tenderness. Horror is countered by humor. Grief is countered by acceptance. The book’s title infers death and decay; indeed, a layer of pain-bodies withers across the surface, but they shiver with an underlying aliveness that pushes skyward through the cracks of heartbreak. In the shadow work of this poetry, there is a small fire of inexorable love serving as a lighthouse through sorrow and into rebirth.