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

A second and final selection of favourite passages from this book:


                      Never and always sleep so close
their hair intertwines and tangles as they twist.

*

         Sometimes this means ignoring the nudity
of a quiet day.

from "The Smoldering Hand"

As it is, I am rich with different versions of myself, and I do not know an antidote for me.

from "Autobiography toward a Study of a Thousand Wounds"

The corridors of me whisper with chains.

*

                              I pass through ghosts 

of my own gone self. The little winds

that are its pulse.

from "Autobiography with God Complex and Epidemic"

How the sleep came, a downdraft

of birds.

 from "Autobiography in Not-Song and October"

                              The impossible strings

of pearls I once believed were days.

from "What Cultivation Means"

Welcome to changing everything. Welcome to starving

out of sleep. By morning, weariness will have replaced

the jawbone of a thinned and willful sky.

This illness is savage. These clouds, they are scythes.

end of "There Remain New Branches"

They kept evolving unpredictable results, found a vertigo of snakes and called it the mind, found time and called us its puppets.

from "Antidote with Attempts at Diagnosis"

What hooks you breaks you. Rides you clean.

*

Blessed are those for whom the sound of memory has a sharpness of violins.

          They shall feel scaffolding deep in the blood.

Blessed are those who walk a shoreline while its whispers swarm.

          Meaning is a bird call in the interim.

from "Antidote with Beatitudes"

                              It is not the trait

of an inherited gene, it is not inherited:

it is ours to take. What being means

is a trick that brightens. One finds oneself

queen among the dead. One finds oneself draped

in ashes and made. The shapes of rain and

candid lenses. The facts of hammer and grease.

end of "Wholeness Is an Imagined State"

At the time of this posting, Foyle's has Body Thesaurus for 35% off.

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.

"Interview under Hypnosis" by Jennifer Militello

I've been reading Body Thesaurus (Tupelo Press), the new second collection by my friend Jennifer Militello, and asked her if I could post the following poem here.

Interview under Hypnosis

Describe what you would have seen had the roosters

woken you closer to dawn.

Late August already. The jagged at their sins. 

God crouching at the labor of us, us crouching

at the labor of ourselves, with iron rods sewn

inside our clothes to keep our glass bodies

from breaking. Listening shivers at

the nerve endings. Things unfailingly cringe.

Describe being endangered.

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

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

A bruise finds me, a bruise knows where I sleep:

the pear’s sickly skin the color of a throat,

ravines that sing where ravines never were,

the sky in igneous ropes. 

Describe being unreal.

When I finally woke, what was the world

but sleep. Graveyards where the wind is why,

wild as cursive and motorcycle-stark and white

as a gown of waiting. I am melting toward a world,

the small belly, into vivid such-liquids and

a disguise of lavishes. October lacerations.

The neon nears. No one tells me what

to believe and for once I believe in nothing.

Jennifer Militello

At the time of posting, Body Thesaurus is available from Foyle's at a brilliant 35% discount. 

"The Next Big Thing"

The indefatigable Sophie Mayer has tagged me in a blog game called "The Next Big Thing," where one uses a set list of questions to interview oneself about one's most recent or next book and tags others whose work s/he admires to do the same. Here I answer questions about my (presumably) forthcoming third collection, Imagined Sons; my pamphlet/chapbook The Son (Oystercatcher, 2009) provides a sample of it. Thanks for thinking of me, Sophie!

What is the working title of your book?

Imagined Sons

Where did the idea come from for the book?

It began with a prose poem I wrote in 1995, where I imagined meeting my son when he came of age. I wrote half a dozen such poems over the next ten years. 

What genre does your book fall under?

Poetry

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I think a different actor would need to play each new incarnation of the imagined son, to suggest the breadth of possibility. I'd love Christina Ricci to play me. 

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Imagined Sons explores a birthmother's consciousness through two kinds of poems: Imagined Sons, where the birthmother imagines meeting her son once he's come of age; and Birthmother's Catechisms, where the same question recurs over time with different answers. 

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

The first poem was written in 1995, but I didn't work on the series wholeheartedly until 2006 (at that point only six  "Imagined Sons" had been written). The first draft of the manuscript took the better part of a year, but I've been revising the manuscript steadily since then. 

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

The desire to explain or share my experience as a birthmother in a more immersive, less confessional poetry. 

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

I expect people who enjoy flash fiction would like the generally narrative drive of the prose poems.


The poets I'm tagging are two wonderfully imaginative, intelligent, and kind poets. Their interviews should be up within a week:
Jennifer Militello
Zoe Brigley

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.