Peter Filkins and Jennifer Militello - New England Poets

Exploring the space between nature and culture, the poems in Peter Filkins’ new collection Water / Music anchor themselves in the timely and the timeless. Rich and diverse in their formal intricacy, they move with ease from narrative to meditation, from close physical observation to the haunts of memory, and from lyric sorrow to the pleasure of living in the world.

Jennifer Militello’s new collection, The Pact, confronts obsession, intimacy, and abuse―it offers an indictment against affection and a portent against zeal. Through love poems inspired by such disparate spaces as a British art museum and the reptile house of a local zoo, poems comparing a romantic affair to the religious cult at Jonestown and a mother’s role to a Congolese power figure bristling with nails, The Pact makes familiar themes new, odd, and deadly cutting.