Tupelo Press 2013 Winter Spring Catalog L8x10 USE THIS

Body Thesaurus
Poems by Jennifer Militello
In her second book, which was a finalist for the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, selected by Marilyn Hacker, Jennifer
Militello investigates the tensions of identity as a source of illness and health. Body Thesaurus presents the human physique
as a flawed conduit and, through poems highlighting symptoms, antidotes, and diagnostic tests, seeks alternate renderings
for the complexities of self. Even as the endangered psyche supplies a filter, gods are confronted, maladies are faced, and
actualities are marked, remembered, or lost. The beauty of struggle and the chance for redemption act as counterstream,
increasingly evident and — again and again in the poet’s verse — indisputably real.
“Militello is one of our richest younger poets, and the poems of Body Thesaurus are opulent in their ‘goldrush want.’
‘Dear body I do not resent, / experiment with me,’ she implores. Body Thesaurus is a haunted and haunting
voyage through the body's analogies, which expand to embrace whole worlds: the sensual, the material, and the
spiritual.” — G. C. Waldrep
Body Thesaurus
Jennifer Militello
$16.95 paper, ISBN 978-1-936797-28-8
May 2013
Memory:
long in my veins like a country
of water, long like whispers darker
than the bronze of plums, than
the silence prized from the layman's
mouth. No counting down
to the catastrophe here.
No autumn mixes of laughter.
If I were awake, the gallows
inside me would trouble
and take, lay of the land,
anger or sun. I have never
remembered the tightening
of ropes. I have never
remembered the reason.
Joanne Smith
Jennifer Militello
is the author of Flinch of Song (Tupelo, 2009,
page 20), winner of the Tupelo Press First
Book Award, as well as the chapbook Anchor
Chain, Open Sail. Her work has appeared in
American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review,
The New Republic, The North American Review,
The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Best New
Poets 2008. She lives in Goffstown, New
Hampshire.
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