A Camouflage of Specimens and Garments

by Jennifer Militello

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781936797752
Publisher:	Tupelo Press, Inc.
Publication date:	05/02/2016
Pages:	86
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Jennifer Militello is the author of three poetry collections published by Tupelo Press: FLINCH OF SONG (2009), winner of the Tupelo Press First Book Award, BODY THESAURUS (2013), named a finalist for the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award by Marilyn Hacker, and A CAMOUFLAGE OF SPECIMENS AND GARMENTS (2016). Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The North American Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Best New Poets 2008. She is also the author of the chapbook Anchor Chain, Open Sail.

Editorial Reviews

09/05/2016
Through haunting language and metaphor, Militello (Body Thesaurus) conjures a third collection that operates as a disturbing representation of mental anguish as it spills into violence. In poems grouped as "songs," "dictionaries," or epistles addressed to B, a sequence of speakers meditate on familiar yet foreign images: Red Riding Hood's grandmother recalls being ravished by the wolf, Artemis lies in wait for prey, Icarus mourns his wings, and Odysseus longs for home. "A Dictionary of the Symphony in the Voice of Ludwig van Beethoven" depicts Beethoven beset by a looming predatory presence that "will fling you over its shoulder tarnish you turn you into a schoolboy." Meanwhile, the person writing to B clings to sanity in a "black trance" where "All I know to hold onto slips. A stitched thread to control each buttonhole's abyss." Poems in the voice of teenage murder victim Marion Parker may be too morbid for some readers, and. Militello's language can be melodramatic or precious ("My heart filled with villanelles of longing"). But the collection is largely an exquisite example of the modern gothic: shadowy, beset by menacing weather and violent feelings, and positively bewitching. When Militello writes "I want to be anesthesia sly inside the patient,/ counting down to knock her out," she describes and demonstrates her own ingenuity at its best. (May)

Publishers Weekly