Martenson’s poems are narratives of thinking. They are landscapes in which abstract concepts have the presence and force of physical objects—you may hit your head on them. The focus is on dissonance, whether between perception and received ideas, between feelings and convention, between lesbian identity and social prejudice, or between the desire to make the world orderly, intelligible, and finding the systems for doing so wanting and ambiguity everywhere. The diverse forms push against words in single file, against the ways syntax projects coherence and smoothes over disjunctions.

Jennifer Martenson was born in Seattle, spent a number of years in Chicago and now lives in Providence, RI. She works in libraries and is both a musician and a poet. Burning Deck has published Xq281 as a chapbook. Unsound is her first full book.

On Xq281:

“Martenson, a Chicago-based poet, has hit the proverbial nail on the head with this short but profound contribution to the “gay gene” discussion… The text is a blend of irony, sad truth, and angry retort. The entirely blank page above each footnote is in itself further commentary on…the absence from mainstream discussion of the content being argued in the footnotes.”

—Denise Bazzett, www.newpages.com

“Martenson appropriates the authoritative diction and discourse of science, and makes it boomerang back on itself.... The loop-the-loop of qualifications, piled-high clauses, and parenthetical statements complicates arguments until they’re hanged by their own cockeyed logics.... There’s nothing artificial or superficial about her own deeply investigatory impulses. She bonds description to rhizomic narrative in an admirable sort of ‘molecular origami.’”

—Christine Hume, Chicago Review