Tupelo Press, 2021
If you are someone like me who usually – but not always – closes her correspondence to friends and family with the word “love,” Jennifer Militello’s “The Pact” (Tupelo Press) might make you want to think about what it means when you use – or withhold – that word. For the Militello in this, her fifth poetry collection, the language of love feels oxymoronic, characterized by violence, fierce ironies and impossible obligations, conditions very far from any religious, philosophical or even secular ideals. Intimate relationships are the main subjects for the book and her relationship poems refuse to console or reward the reader with last minute aesthetic or emotional escapes from their pessimistic views of human nature; this refusal provides a welcome relief from poems that seek to provide conventional affirmations or resignations when addressing the incongruities of love. Militello’s signature wrenched and wrenching metaphors – stunningly original, somewhat reminiscent of Donne – shock us, unlikely comparison by unlikely comparison, into ways of re-seeing things we know but may prefer to suppress for the sake of getting through the day, or perhaps for the sake of preserving our sanity. Being superficially safe or nice, however, is not Militello’s modus operandi. Provocation is. Her book’s powerful opening poem “Agape Feast,” for instance, does provide the reader with a love feast, but not the one of Christian fellowship that the title portends. Instead the poem presents us with a smorgasbord of definitions that become stranger and more disturbing as the poem reaches for its desolate conclusion: