ABOUT THIS BOOK

In her second book, Jennifer Militello uses symptoms, diagnostic tests, and antidotes to illuminate tensions of identity that are central to illness and health. An endangered psyche confronts maladies and faces gods in poems that embody the complexities of self. Selected by Marilyn Hacker as a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, Body Thesaurus examines the failing conduit of human physicality, offering beauty as a counter-stream to struggle.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Jennifer Militello is the author of Body Thesaurus, named one of 2013’s top ten poetry books by Best American Poetry, and Flinch of Song, winner of the Tupelo Press First Book Award. She has been awarded the Barbara Bradley Award from the New England Poetry Club, the Ruskin Art Club Poetry Award from Red Hen Press, and the 49th Parallel Award from Bellingham Review, as well as grants and fellowships from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Writers at Work, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Militello teaches in the MFA program at New England College.

REVIEWS

“While these poems are the inner songs of the intriguing and elusive speaker, their capaciousness—including hemlock, marigolds, a menacing menagerie of animals, God, pumpkins, and paper cranes—Militello explodes open the self, making her speaker both a maze of internality and the source of the whole natural world.”— Abigail Lee, storySouth

“With echos of Plath and Sexton, a conjuring of confessionalism in the housing of myth-making, Militello manages the cult of me beautifully and deftly, letting her readers offer themselves — or any other figures they want to place within these woods and waysides — as the personalities. She provides the circumstances, the parameters of the spaces.”— Christine Holm, The Volta blog

“Her poems are paradoxical lyrics—disorienting syntax mixes parts of speech to create strange and uneven shifts of sound and meaning. … Her speakers trudge through circumstance, confronting the futility, fleetingness, and finalities of everyday life.”— Gabrielle Flam, Boston Review

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CONTENTS
The Skins We Slit Seeking the Vertebrae of Snakes / 3

The self is not a shadow of the self.

Personality State: Prophet / 7
Personality State: Scavenger's Daughter / 8
Personality State: Persephone / 9
Personality State: Animal / 11
Personality State: Convict / 12
Personality State: Statue / 13
Personality State: Husk / 14

The self is not a symptom.

Felon's Logic /17
Stockholm Syndrome with Death as the Captor / 19
Phobia / 21
Hemorrhage / 22
Somnambulism / 23
Empathy / 24
Afterburn / 26

The self is not a battery of tests.

Interview under Hypnosis / 29
Rorschach Test / 31
Polygraph Test / 32
X-Ray of a Rib Cage / 34
The Smoldering Hand / 35
Sound of Eye, Wind, and Limb / 37
Eye / 38

The self is not what is said about the self.

Autobiography toward a Study of the Thousand Wounds / 41
Autobiography with God Complex and Epidemic / 43
Autobiography in Not-Song and October / 45
What the Cultivation Means / 47
The Unspeakable, Said / 48
Conjugating the Void / 49

The self is not a study of the world.

There Remain New Branches / 53
World Hypothesis / 54
The Zoology of Imaginary Joy / 55
The Botany of Man-Made Things / 56
Memory: / 57
Theory of Relativity / 58
Body Thesaurus / 59

The self is not a cure.

Antidote with Attempts at Diagnosis / 63
Antidote with Placebo / 65
Antidote with Beatitudes / 67
Antidote with Early Weather / 68
Antidote with Symptoms / 69
Tourniquet / 70
Preventing a Relapse / 71

Wholeness Is an Imagined State / 75

Acknowledgments / 78