New Hampshire Poet Laureate Jennifer Militello will read a selection of her poems at 4 p.m. Tuesday, April 8, at Colby-Sawyer College. The public is invited to the free event in the Cleveland Colby Colgate Archives at the Susan Colgate Cleveland Library/Learning Center. 

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic described Militello as “one of the finest poets of her generation, an immensely original poet who has enriched American literature since her first book.” 

That first book, Anchor Chain, Open Sail, was published in 2006. Her fifth book, a 2019 memoir, Knock Wood, earned the Dzanc Nonfiction Prize. And, Militello’s upcoming hybrid collection, Identifying the Pathogen, was a finalist for the Fiction Collective Two Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize. 

Militello’s work has also been published in The Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry London, and The Poetry Review.  

The director of the Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing at New England College previously taught at Brown University, the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and Rhode Island School of Design. 

Prior to her public reading April 8, she will discuss Knock Wood with Colby-Sawyer Professor Ewa Chrusciel’s intermediate creative writing class. Chrusciel said it will be a unique gift for students to meet Militello, whose poems and poetic essays they’ve been reading and analyzing. 

“Her poems are punctuated by passion and grief via hauntingly dense, dark and luminous images,” said Chrusciel, the M. Roy London Endowed Chair.  

Militello began her five-year term as poet laureate in April 2024. In the role, she is an ambassador for poets and seeks to elevate the visibility and value of poetry in the state. 

 

ANTIDOTE WITH BEATITUDES  

Blessed are the indifferent, for they shall never weep.  

Blessed are the bewildered, for they shall soon forgive. 

Blessed are those who beg for sadness until their marrow breaks.  

Blessed are those who let gone be gone.  

      What hooks you breaks you. Rides you clean.  

Blessed are those who have no self to say amen to,  

      to trawl for them while they sleep.  

Blessed are those who define the world as some slipped thing,  

      some bitter tantrum. They shall know the world.  

Blessed are those who, with a foreign tongue,  

      speak asters as the language of the rain.  

Blessed are those for whom sin is a saint.  

      They shall go down on their knees,  

      the sails of their pale faces turned from any wind.  

Blessed are those whose chalices are filled with an arid semantics.  

      They shall vomit at night every perfection of the body.  

Blessed are those for whom the sound of memory has a sharpness of violins.  

      They shall feel scaffolding deep in the blood.  

Blessed are those who walk a shoreline while its whispers swarm.  

      Meaning is a bird call in the interim. 

from Body Thesaurus, Tupelo Press, © 2013, Jennifer Militello. Used with permission.