The Pact

“Jennifer Militello is one of the finest poets of her generation,
an immensely original poet who has enriched American literature since her first book.”
—Charles Simic

“What a beautiful book of songs, pacts, spells, love poems, chants, pledges, odes! Such lyric abandon here, and also such deep lyric knowledge. Knowledge of what? you might ask. Of how bodies can ‘lengthen in rain’ and how an hour might become ‘a moth-eaten stain.’ ‘I keep my binoculars focused on / the past field,’ this poet says, ‘something might arrive / to coax the present field from its ghost.’ This kind of coaxing is most welcome. It isn’t the knowledge of past or foreknowledge. No. It is the lyric knowledge. To achieve it, one must go sideways, speak in tongues. ‘I promise you fraud,’ Militello tells us in one of her love poems. But then, if a reader is lucky enough to find a poet as talented as Jennifer Militello, one might as well use her own words, and, opening the book, say: ‘I promise to let you / brainwash me.’ Why? Because this is, indeed, a beautiful book.”

—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

“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.” —Catherine Imbriglio in Green Mountains Review

“Militello’s language… is largely an exquisite example of the modern gothic: shadowy, beset by menacing weather and violent feelings, and positively bewitching.” —Publishers Weekly

“Jennifer Militello’s The Pact is full of intimate insights into family dynamics… these poems demonstrate how, for the poet, love is biological—a reflex of the body, an act of self-protection, and a physical need.”

—Rebecca Ruth Gold for Harriet Books, Poetry Foundation

“Militello makes order out of chaos sentence after sounding sentence, and succeeds in helping us at least try to understand human frailties.” —Booklist

“Militello’s poems… illuminate and mystify.” —The Rumpus