Jennifer Militello
Poet & Memoirist

Identifying the Pathogen

Composed as a lab notebook recording various surgeries, autopsies, and experiments, Identifying the Pathogen tells the story of a scientist on an obsessive quest to document an ailment that resists classification. The book considers the body in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and is woven through with the story of Anna Morandi Manzolini—an eighteenth-century Italian anatomist and artist who struggled to support a husband suffering from depression—as well as several accounts detailing a ruptured appendix, a splintered cello, and an ill-fated rock climbing excursion.
 
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
Militello makes order out of chaos sentence after sounding sentence, and succeeds in helping us at least try to understand human frailties. –Booklist

Who.

Jennifer Militello is the Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. She is the author of the hybrid collection Identifying the Pathogen, named a finalist for the 2024 FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, The Pact (Tupelo Press/Shearsman Books, 2021), and the memoir Knock Wood, winner of the Dzanc Nonfiction Prize (Dzanc Books, 2019), as well as four previous books of poetry. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry, Poetry London, and The Poetry Review (UK). Militello has taught at Brown University, the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and the Rhode Island School of Design, and currently teaches in the MFA program at New England College.

 

[photo by Beowulf Sheehan]

a profile image of Jennifer Militello--a woman with long blond hair in a black shirt with a black background
``...positively bewitching.``
Publishers Weekly

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