Distributed for Tupelo Press
The Pact
In her newest collection, award-winning poet and memoirist Jennifer Militello confronts obsession, intimacy, and abuse. Through love poems inspired by such disparate spaces as a British art museum and the reptile house of a local zoo, poems comparing a romantic affair to the religious cult at Jonestown and a mother’s role to a Congolese power figure bristling with nails, The Pact offers an indictment against affection and a portent against zeal. This book places pleasure alongside pain, even as it delivers Militello’s trademark talent for innovation and ritualization of the strange.
Table of Contents
Contents
Agape Feast | 5
Species | 9
Lineage Is Its Own Religion | 10
Sibling Medusa | 11
Sibling Invention | 13
Sibling Bipolar | 15
Sibling Frankenstein | 17
Sibling Parasitic| 18
Ode to Superstition | 19
Homesickness Is a Geographic Nostalgia | 20
Oxymoronic Love | 25
& | 27
Chemistry | 28
Anubis Love | 30
Geographic Tongue | 31
Odaxelagnia | 33
Erotomania | 34
Pledge | 35
Fretwork | 37
The Punishment of One Is the Love Song of Another | 38
What My Mother Wears | 41
My Mother’s Interiority | 42
Job’s Comfort | 43
Nkisi Nkondi | 44
The Narcissist’s Parts of Speech | 46
Nlasi Nkondi | 47
My Mother Is the Wasp Egg Attached to the Belly of the Tarantula | 49
The Pact | 50
Tough Love in a Vulgar Tongue | 52
Dear Hiss: | 53
Poem to the Word of my Name | 56
My Mother Is in Antarctica | 57
Idolatry | 63
How Feeling Too Much Is Like Tracking or Taxidermy | 64
In the Rainshadow of Whom | 65
Blooded Cold | 66
How to Construct the Hero of a Western | 67
If Our Love Were Jonestown | 68
Lake Natron | 70
A City Mapped Out in Conversation | 71
Electric Fence | 72
Ode to Love | 77
Notes | 79
Acknowledgments | 81
Agape Feast | 5
Species | 9
Lineage Is Its Own Religion | 10
Sibling Medusa | 11
Sibling Invention | 13
Sibling Bipolar | 15
Sibling Frankenstein | 17
Sibling Parasitic| 18
Ode to Superstition | 19
Homesickness Is a Geographic Nostalgia | 20
Oxymoronic Love | 25
& | 27
Chemistry | 28
Anubis Love | 30
Geographic Tongue | 31
Odaxelagnia | 33
Erotomania | 34
Pledge | 35
Fretwork | 37
The Punishment of One Is the Love Song of Another | 38
What My Mother Wears | 41
My Mother’s Interiority | 42
Job’s Comfort | 43
Nkisi Nkondi | 44
The Narcissist’s Parts of Speech | 46
Nlasi Nkondi | 47
My Mother Is the Wasp Egg Attached to the Belly of the Tarantula | 49
The Pact | 50
Tough Love in a Vulgar Tongue | 52
Dear Hiss: | 53
Poem to the Word of my Name | 56
My Mother Is in Antarctica | 57
Idolatry | 63
How Feeling Too Much Is Like Tracking or Taxidermy | 64
In the Rainshadow of Whom | 65
Blooded Cold | 66
How to Construct the Hero of a Western | 67
If Our Love Were Jonestown | 68
Lake Natron | 70
A City Mapped Out in Conversation | 71
Electric Fence | 72
Ode to Love | 77
Notes | 79
Acknowledgments | 81