Jennifer Militello's Body Thesaurus (Tupelo, 2013), first selection

Back in 2008, I posted some fine passages from an issue of one of my favourite American literary magazines, Denver Quarterly. One of them was by Jennifer Militello, who in turn found me on Facebook. We met for the first time at the AWP conference in Chicago in 2012 (as she lives in New Hampshire). 

While I liked her first collection, Flinch of Song, I'm loving her second collection, Body Thesaurus. Here's my first selection of some of my favourite passages from it.


Then the color blue, like the pupil music dilates
inside us, throws wet on the line a twisted dress,
so free of the body's stem that within its shape

a storm is seen.

*

Truth brings in its hissing room.

from "The Skins We Slit Seeking the Vertebrae of Snakes"

I paled like a throat of birch.

*

Each small animal fallen wild. What I thought

was cold cried in the night like an abandoned well.

from "Personality State: Prophet"

I want to give fate a reason

to hate me and exhaust me and lick me up.

*

One eye to the nowhere periscope of sleep.

*

The many bicycles of memory and their many

broken chains.

*

                                                         Flock

of road, wind forbidden, excellence of coast.

from "Personality State: Scavenger's Daughter"

...the sky's white sheet drying in the wind....

*

The wheat has a wind-violence in it yet.

from "Personality State: Persephone"

I am only wolves, a thin endless shiver of what

is undernourished, of what I once saw drinking

with its stone-cold tongue at the plethora of rain.

*

Death: its mere parasol baptized me once.

My memories are necklaces made from its teeth.

from "Personality State: Animal"

A hungry downriver in my voice.

from "Somnambulism"

Things too thin inhabit our dreams and we take on

their starving.

*

There is an entire August storm in everything said,

and to open the violent hives of remembering,

we imagine marigolds, birds drowned in the creek,

the lights left on in a room left behind.

from "Afterburn"

Late August already. The jagged at their sins.

God crouching at the labor of us, us crouching

at the labor of ourselves....

*

I hear reasons not to cry but I am crying to feel

the cold come in like an illness that will recover me.

from "Interview under Hypnosis"

When joy is hollow armor, fractures can be seen

where clean breaks are imagined; in a world

where nothing is clear, the world is a wound.

from "X-Ray of a Rib Cage"

At the time of posting, Body Thesaurus is available from Foyle's for 35% off.

Jennifer Militello's Flinch of Song (Tupelo, 2009)

Some favourite passages from Militello's compelling first collection follow. Spacing may be distorted by Blogger's limitations (or my limitations in using Blogger).




So you are 
another, sheltering a little flask of sorrow, with
two eyed caged in wildness.

from "Manifestation"

Its weight

strains the metronome of my heart, and what is absent

makes the world what it is.

from "History of the Always Pain"

All the petals falling from

the same clear pause. And even if it seemed

a dream coming through, it became a reality

leaving. What kept us digging but

the brilliance tangling our woodgrained hair,

opening wind, its wide convertible.

end of "History of Siblings"

I swear it was summer: I was strung through

with light.

opening of "Confusing Past with Passion"

Among the dangers of hungers of others, we are much

too thin.

from "Reunion"

I say, how beautiful

the ruined barn, the late blade of candidness.

I mistake the cathedral for a sodium light

sifting down from how it lingers, everywhere

and sometimes always, a mist of linen,

a hay-sweet night. I notice dandelions

become exact around us.

from "Taking Care"

There is a quiet I excavate

in waiting for you.

from "Manifestation"

The only identity I know is alone in the sigh's

bright wilderness, with workings one can take apart

and still not understand.

opening of "Living Where the Halyards Can Be Heard"

Once the windows open, the cure will whistle in.

last line of "One Side of the Story"

Nothing is made of wind, but wind is made

of wasps caught between the window and the screen.

opening stanza of "Azrael Speaks"

Grief unbuttoning its high-collared dress.

Change as a heron that strikes at the lake.

Death at the heels, herding.

Wind as a skin in that it passes.

from "Miserere"

Buy from independent bookstores! In the UK, you can buy Flinch of Song from Foyle's, in the US from Powell's.