Poetry Today: Jennifer Militello and Quintin Collins « Kenyon Review Blog kenyonreview.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from kenyonreview.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
POETRY, and
Tin House; she has been awarded the Barbara Bradley Award, the Yeats Poetry Prize, the Ruskin Art Club Poetry Award, the Betty Gabehart Prize, and the 49th Parallel Award. She is currently a faculty member in the MFA program at New England College. Today she takes a moment to talk with us about her new book, which challenges existing notions about the love poem, for “but what are poems for if not to express extremity? If not to both rage about and celebrate obsessions?”
Rosebud Ben-Oni: I
really felt what you had to say about love in your opening poem “Agape Feast,” especially the last lines: “Its mercy is electric, it is storied, it is rank./ Its mercy is a tablet dissolved in a glass,/more invisible the more you drink.” Can you tell us how this breathtaking poem (which is a gift to read aloud!) sets the stage, so to say, for the rest of the poems in
by Catherine Imbriglio | May 27, 2021The Pactby Jennifer MilitelloTupelo 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.
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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 origina
The series presents remote live reading by award-winning author Jennifer Militello, April 15
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FARMINGTON The University of Maine at Farmington’s celebrated Visiting Writers Series presents poet and non-fiction writer Jennifer Militello as the popular program’s final reader of the season. Militello will read from her work in a remote live reading at 7:30 p.m., Thursday, April 15. The reading will be followed by a question and answer talkback with the author.
Audience may attend by invitation only. To request an invitation to the virtual reading, please contact Amy Neswald at [email protected]
Militello’s ”Knock Wood: A Memoir in Essays” presents a woven tapestry of memory, dream, personal history, and family story. It was the 2019 winner of the Dzanc Books Nonfiction prize. Her other works include a forthcoming poetry collection “The Pact.” Her writing has been featured in “The Paris Review,” “Ploughshares,” and “Best Ameri