Jennifer Militello – författare

In her newest collection, award-winning poet and memoirist Jennifer Militello confronts obsession, intimacy, and abuse. Through love poems inspired by such disparate spaces as a British art museum and the reptile house of a local zoo, comparing a romantic affair to the religious cult at Jonestown and a mother's role to a Congolese power figure bristling with nails, The Pact offers an indictment against affection and a portent against zeal. This book places pleasure alongside pain, even as it delivers Militello's trademark talent for innovation and ritualization of the strange."What a beautiful book of songs, pacts, spells, love poems, chants, pledges, odes! Such lyric abandon here, and also such deep lyric knowledge. Knowledge of what? you might ask. Of how bodies can 'lengthen in rain' and how an hour might become 'a motheaten stain.' 'I keep my binoculars focused on / the past fi eld,' this poet says, 'something might arrive / to coax the present fi eld from its ghost.' This kind of coaxing is most welcome. It isn't the knowledge of past or foreknowledge. No. It is the lyric knowledge. To achieve it, one must go sideways, speak in tongues. 'I promise you fraud,' Militello tell us. But then, if a reader is lucky enough to find a poet as talented as Jennifer Militello, one might as well use her own words, and, opening the book, say: 'I promise to let you / brainwash me.' Why? Because this is, indeed, a beautiful book."-Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa"Jennifer Militello is one of the finest poets of her generation, an immensely original poet who has enriched American literature since her first book." -Charles Simic"Militello's language... is largely an exquisite example of the modern gothic: shadowy, beset by menacing weather and violent feelings, and positively bewitching." -Publishers Weekly"Militello's poems... illuminate and mystify." -The Rumpus"Militello makes order out of chaos sentence after sounding sentence, and succeeds in helping us at least try to understand human frailties." -Booklist

In her second book, Jennifer Militello uses symptoms, diagnostic tests, and antidotes to illuminate tensions of identity that are central to illness and health. An endangered psyche confronts maladies and faces gods in poems that embody the complexities of self. Selected by Marilyn Hacker as a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, Body Thesaurus examines the failing conduit of human physicality, offering beauty as a counter-stream to struggle.

In her third full-length collection of poems, Jennifer Militello weaves fragmentary letters addressing illness and struggle through ventriloquisms of mythological heroes and dead composers, ancient goddesses and murdered girls. Stylized “dictionaries” open into lay-ered definitions meant like magical clothing or tutelary amulets to provide shelter from a world that cannot be controlled. As the poet stitches together a plethoric identity to ex-plore disguises, A Camouflage of Specimens and Garments casts a smokescreen of selves.

Winner of the 2018 Dzanc Nonfiction Prize“Knock Wood is an absolute wonder, and Jennifer Militello is at the top of her form.” —Andre Dubus III, author of Townie and The House of Sand and FogIn Knock Wood, the first nonfiction collection by award-winning poet Jennifer Militello, a knock on wood to ward off illness sets in motion a chain of events and memories that call into question the very structure of time.Anchored by a wooden ring, Militello explores her life through the lens of three intertwined elements: the story of a mentally ill aunt in an abusive marriage; a high school romance with a boy who eventually dies of a heroin overdose; and an extra-marital affair characterized by an otherworldly connection. Cause and effect reverse as significant events—an arrest for a felony committed in high school, a trip by train to meet an illicit lover, and a suicide attempt on those same New York tracks—seem to influence one another outside of time and space. As Militello delicately threads each memory to the next, she explores the themes of family damage and the precarious ties of love.Militello has been recognized many times for her work in poetry and prose, including honors such as the Yeats Poetry Prize from the W.B. Yeats Society of New York, the Betty Gabehart Poetry Prize, and the Tupelo Press First Book Award. Her collection Body Thesaurus was named one of the top poetry books of 2013 by Best American Poetry.

In her newest collection, award-winning poet and memoirist Jennifer Militello confronts obsession, intimacy, and abuse. Through love poems inspired by such disparate spaces as a British art museum and the reptile house of a local zoo, poems comparing a romantic affair to the religious cult at Jonestown and a mother’s role to a Congolese power figure bristling with nails, The Pact offers an indictment against affection and a portent against zeal. This book places pleasure alongside pain, even as it delivers Militello’s trademark talent for innovation and ritualization of the strange.