A Camouflage of Specimens and Garments by Jennifer Militello (review)

In a 2011 interview with Julianna Baggott, Jennifer Militello describes the experience of waiting tables in terms of a shift–or, rather, shifts–in identity: "I had to manage a multitude of happenings and predicted outcomes and possible scenarios. And I had to do it all while wearing a face that was not quite my own." In other words, she had to dwell in a multiplicity of environments simultaneously: a restaurant multiverse in which, in order to succeed, one must acknowledge all possibilities as actualities. In A Camouflage of Specimens and Garments, her third collection, Militello works in this same space. Her work calls for the kind of careful, attentive readership required to inhabit the poetic spaces created by Mina Loy and H.D. These poems unfold as telescoping ladders; at the top, the reader reaches a view of human experience stretching, vista-like, from birth to death and beyond. To reach this view, one must first find one's footing on each step. Militello's language calls to mind Matthea Harvey and Joyelle McSweeney. It is more symphonic than syntactic, gathering separate sounds and meanings to move towards a finale that is fully inclusive, both harmonious and dissident, terrible and beautiful, mysterious and clear.

The force driving A Camouflage of Specimens and Garments appears in the title itself: camouflage. The poems center around the idea of adopting other identities in an attempt to define one's own. For instance, Militello offers a series of poems about Marion Parker, who, in 1927, was kidnapped and killed. Parker died before she reached her teens – arguably, the age in which we define and claim our identities. Militello writes in Parker's voice, describing her relationship with the world–and who she was becoming before she left it: "The world is a wind I thought I heard just before / I heard nothing. The world is what the pulse of me / whispered just before it stalled." We recognize who and what we are in the world only when we are aware of losing both. Therefore, we can't fully reckon with who we are and how we live while we're living; we lack the language to express and understand it.

Ironically, the inability to define or explain herself through language leads Parker to define her existence. That's because she exists as—and only as—her own. "No one expects from me now," Militello writes, "No mourning the model specimen, little Marion, / for what she was." Parker did live on in song—particularly, Vernon Dalhart's "Little Marian Parker"—but not as herself: Dalhart misspelled her name. In dying, then, Parker is reborn as a being wholly her own: "I will build a womb bathtub-cold / and be born, white as its porcelain prone." Knowledge becomes her freedom, death a place where definition is self-created, away from preconceptions, ideals and ideas of family, society, even religion. Indeed, in "A Letter to the Coroner in the Voice of Marion Parker," Militello flips the idea of death as the bridegroom, a common Christian trope: "Lay me out as if the coffin is only a dress / or a wedding I never made it to. My God, I will / run off. My family will wait and I will be free / with my hair let down and I will not return." Note the insistence on the word "will." In dying, she has found and followed her own will, beyond body and its brutal requirements.

In "A Dictionary of Filming the Inside of a Tornado," Militello again adopts a historical figure's voice: Tim Samaras, a famed tornado chaser. The poem begins as a bursting-at-the-seams entreaty for the world to show itself in its entirety: "Unlid the sag, however late, the long collapse, unlid the weep, / let air in so the rush can breathe, let live, let tingle the capillary blood." To be truly alive means to see all that is life: the shock and awe, beauty and blistering horror central to Longinus's theory of the sublime. But just as...