Böcker av Jennifer Militello

Jennifer Militello's work is ruminative and lyrical but with an unusually theatrical verve, which is displayed in associative leaps so agile that readers will be exhilarated by the imagination at work (and play) in each poem. This powerfully unified first book grapples with what is simultaneously gigantic and miniscule in human existence: the momentous everyday dramas of love and family.

Anchored by a wooden ring, an award-winning poet 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 extramarital affair characterized by an otherworldly connection.

In her newest collection, Jennifer Militello confronts obsession, intimacy, and abuse. The book places pleasure alongside pain, even as it delivers Militello's trademark talent for innovation and ritualization of the strange.

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.

Poetry. Award-winning poet Jennifer Militello's third full-length collection, A CAMOUFLAGE OF SPECIMENS AND GARMENTS, casts a smokescreen of selves. Fragmentary letters addressing illness and struggle are interspersed with ventriloquisms in the voices of mythological heroes and long-dead composers, ancient goddesses and murdered girls. Intricate "dictionaries" offer multi- layered definitions that, like layers of clothing or ancient amulets, are meant to provide shelter from a world that cannot be controlled. This captivating book stitches together a plethoric identity so as to examine the disguises we all wear.

Poetry. In her second book, Jennifer Militello investigates the tensions of identity as a source of illness and health. BODY THESAURUS presents the human physique as a flawed conduit and, through poems highlighting symptoms, antidotes, and diagnostic tests, seeks alternate renderings for the complexities of self. Even as the endangered psyche supplies a filter, gods are confronted, maladies are faced, and actualities are marked, remembered, or lost. The beauty of struggle and the chance for redemption act as counterstream, increasingly evident and--again and again in the poet's verse--indisputably real.