The Capacity to Love Keeps Us Alive
Introducing American poet Jennifer Militello’s The Pact (2021)
Jennifer Militello’s new poetry collection The Pact is full of intimate insights into family relationships, often narrated from a child’s perspective. Many of the poems center on the speaker’s fraught relationship with her sister and her mother. These poems demonstrate that the love that shapes us most profoundly often predates the kinships that we forge. Love for Militello is biological — a reflex of the body, an act of self-protection, and a physical need.
As if reflecting this biological intimacy, the images used to describe the poet often also describe her intimate others. In the poem after which the collection is titled, which is addressed to her mother, the poet describes herself as “the blood sum of you and my father.” When she refers to the “frayed cord of me,” which is broken, we realize that this cord is an umbilical cord, and as such it belongs to her mother as well.
In “Sibling Parasitic,” the speaker addresses her sister, a spiritual twin of herself: “When I see / you, some old me hurts.” (18) She calls her sister’s body “a comma,” perhaps reflecting the baby’s fetal position. Again, the comma could just as easily refer to the poet’s body. The poet fears the mirror image she witnesses in her sister; as in her relationship with her mother, this fear is a reflex of her body and an expression of her love.
This tense sibling relationship reaches a peak of intimacy in “Job’s Comfort,” in which the poet inhabits a space of fear with her sister. As they sleep together in bed, their bodies again form a biological symbiosis: “We were soft-bodied / in our shells.” Because the sisters are in a profound sense one body, they reach a point when “We would sacrifice / ourselves for one another.”
Despite the anger, jealously, and rage that pervades many of these poems, ultimately this is a book about love in its many manifestations. For Militello, humans love in the way we eat, sleep, and breathe. The capacity to love is not just what makes us human, it is what keeps us alive.
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