The Pact

by Jennifer Militello

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781946482471
Publisher:	Tupelo Press
Publication date:	05/01/2021
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.75(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Jennifer Militello is the author of THE PACT (Tupelo Press, 2021) and Knock Wood, winner of the Dzanc Nonfiction Prize (Dzanc Books, 2019), as well as four previous collections of poetry: A CAMOUFLAGE OF SPECIMENS AND GARMENTS (Tupelo Press, 2016), called "positively bewitching" by Publishers Weekly; BODY THESAURUS (Tupelo Press, 2013), named one of the top books of 2013 by Best American Poetry; FLINCH THE SONG (Tupelo Press, 2009), winner of the Tupelo Press First Book Award; and the chapbook Anchor Chain, Open Sail. Her work has appeared widely in such journals as American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, POETRY, and Tin House, and been anthologized in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, and Poem-a-Day: 365 Poems for Every Occasion. Militello teaches in the MFA program at New England College.

Table of Contents

Contents

Agape Feast | 5
Species | 9
Lineage Is Its Own Religion | 10
Sibling Medusa | 11
Sibling Invention | 13
Sibling Bipolar | 15
Sibling Frankenstein | 17
Sibling Parasitic| 18
Ode to Superstition | 19
Homesickness Is a Geographic Nostalgia | 20
Oxymoronic Love | 25
& | 27
Chemistry | 28
Anubis Love | 30
Geographic Tongue | 31
Odaxelagnia | 33
Erotomania | 34
Pledge | 35
Fretwork | 37
The Punishment of One Is the Love Song of Another | 38
What My Mother Wears | 41
My Mother's Interiority | 42
Job's Comfort | 43
Nkisi Nkondi | 44
The Narcissist's Parts of Speech | 46
Nlasi Nkondi | 47
My Mother Is the Wasp Egg Attached to the Belly of the Tarantula | 49
The Pact | 50
Tough Love in a Vulgar Tongue | 52
Dear Hiss: | 53
Poem to the Word of my Name | 56
My Mother Is in Antarctica | 57
Idolatry | 63
How Feeling Too Much Is Like Tracking or Taxidermy | 64
In the Rainshadow of Whom | 65
Blooded Cold | 66
How to Construct the Hero of a Western | 67
If Our Love Were Jonestown | 68
Lake Natron | 70
A City Mapped Out in Conversation | 71
Electric Fence | 72
Ode to Love | 77
Notes | 79
Acknowledgments | 81

Editorial Reviews

05/17/2021

Militello (Knock Wood) probes the wounds of her relationships with a confessional style and labyrinthine language in her emotionally resonant latest. “Agape Feast,” opens with the somewhat hackneyed lines “What is love but the bruise of the abrasion,/ the fruitlessness, the deep incision,” but arrives at considerably fresher language, “Its ribs/ grate like gnashed teeth. It sings like/ the polished floors of a bank.” A series of poems depicts a fraught sibling relationship, addressing a sister whose mercurial feelings and behavior keep the rest of the family on edge: “Your anger is a dream/ we wake from, having chipped the edges/ of our teeth. Your anger is a tiled floor/ gapped and cracking, asbestos underneath.” Militello has a natural flair for rhyme, complemented by nearly flawless rhythm; the poems beg to be read aloud. However, her commitment to these attributes results in lines and metaphors that do not always stand up to close reading. In “Odaxelagnia,” a speaker addresses a lover with erotic intensity that is dampened by perplexing phrases such as “I sink/ my teeth and they knit your history/ a coat.” While some poems are more successful than others, there is an inventive musicality to Militello’s language that’s easy to enjoy. (May)

Publishers Weekly