ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Jennifer Militello is the author of A Camouflage of Specimens and Garments (Tupelo 2016), Body Thesaurus, named one of 2013’s top ten poetry books by Best American Poetry, and Flinch of Song, winner of the Tupelo Press First Book Award. She has been awarded the Barbara Bradley Award from the New England Poetry Club, the Ruskin Art Club Poetry Award from Red Hen Press, and the 49th Parallel Award from Bellingham Review, as well as grants and fellowships from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Writers at Work, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Militello teaches in the MFA program at New England College.

REVIEWS

“Militello’s is a book infused with restlessness, spiraling around the ideas that suffering not only keeps us alive but makes us live more fiercely, and that being necessarily means, at some point, no longer being. . . The book rests with the realization that by being born to this world, we are born to loss, even to the loss of ourselves.” — Emma Bolden, Southern Humanities Review

"… Flinch of Song by Jennifer Militello from which, were it permissible, I would quote every word of every line of every page. Absolutely drenched in metaphor, simile, allusion and linguistic invention, tightly written without a word let waste its clout, and, quite frankly, dense with spell-binding beauty, Militello’s work is also a poetry of loss, though … not of the physical, but of lovers, of childhood, of family, of identity, of the mind, and of the weight and revelations of the freedom that results from those losses. Parts of the human body are absorbed into elements from nature, voices take on the sounds of rural and marine equivalences, snatches of urbanism reflect the flow of Life and all its struggles and heartbreaks."—John Mingay, Stride Magazine

"As with abstract painting, Militello’s poems are only half comprised of the ostensible subject. The other half is comprised of a vision of the world in which the subject is situated. The subject, then, is actually an intersection of itself and its context, and in this poem, as with many others in the collection, the context is comprised of both interior and exterior landscapes. The subject of the portrait/poem essentially becomes the inseparability of a given self and its world, and the reader cannot gaze on the self—indeed him or herself—without gazing on the world… ."—Christina Cook, Poets’ Quarterly, April 2010

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CONTENTS

Manifestation
The Museum of Being Born

The Museum of Being Born / 5
History of the Always Pain / 6
Passing for Red / 7
The Objectless Place, an Ether Twist / 8
History of Siblings / 9
Confusing Past with Passion / 10
Sympathy/Wisdom / 11
Allergic / 12
I Have Never Stood Outside a House Burned Down / 13
Game with Hours Galloping, a Garland / 14

Manifestation
Dark, Godless Reactions

After Days Not Found / 19
The Zero to Breaking / 20
The Window Painted Shut / 21
From Panama, From Ashes / 22
Infliction / 23
Recipe for the Motorcyclist's Leather Gloves / 24
Aprilia / 26
Reunion / 27
Taking Care / 28
The Conductor's Last Call Before Leaving / 29
North, with the Ingredients for Rain / 30
A Thorn in the Softest Part of the Hand / 31
What We No Longer Know / 32
(start) / 33

Manifestation
Identity Narrative

Identity Narrative / 37
Living Where the Halyards Can Be Heard / 38
A Thunderstorm Reminds Me of My Convictions / 39
Self-Portrait as Someone Else / 40
Instructions to a Portraitist / 43/
One Side of the Story / 42
This Is Elementary / 43
Flinch / 44
There's No Such Thing as a Typical Day / 45
Slow the Bleeding / 46

Manifestation
The Last Burning Room

A Summary of Roots / 51
Answering Fear As If It Were a Question / 52
Questions of Perception / 53
Roam Season / 54
Until We Have No Children / 55
Resignation / 56
The Museum of Being, Ended / 57
Azrael Speaks / 59
Miserere / 60

Acknowledgments / 62