Domestic Corpse

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.

Author Biography

Paul Martínez Pompa (he/him) is a poet and professor who earned degrees from The University of Chicago (B.A.) and Indiana University (M.F.A). His first book, My Kill Adore Him (University of Notre Dame Press), was selected for the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize. His poetry has earned an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award and has been widely anthologized, including in What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Trump Era, and The Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. Chicago Public Radio commissioned his poetry for a project called “In Verse,” which aimed to explore the emotional weight of gun violence. He is currently on the editorial board at Packingtown Review.