In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Jennifer Militello
Your two poems, “Wax Self Portrait/” and “Wax Portrait of a Marriage/” are beautiful short prose pieces. What inspired you to write them?
These two pieces are centered around the story of Anna Morandi Manzolini, an 18th-century Italian artist and anatomist who was in a marriage with another anatomist, her working partner, who suffered from depression and eventually died, leaving her to raise their children alone. Because of her gender, she wasn’t paid a livable wage once he was no longer a partner in their studio and had to give up one of her children for adoption because she couldn’t afford to support her family. She left behind these strange and stunning wax portraits of the two of them, along with a collection of wax sculptures of parts of the body. My forthcoming hybrid collection, Identifying the Pathogen, due out in January 2026, explores her story as one of its threads.
“Wax Self Portrait” reads a little like a spell; indeed, the phrase, “small spell” is repeated. What was the purpose of coming back to that phrase?
I love incantation in that it weaves a sense of expectation and builds tension, and also stitches in music. Each repeated phrasing is a marker a reader returns to like a rest in a musical score, but also an emphasis, this this this, the act of making, the movement and action, the rising tautness of anticipation. Then of course the expectation can be broken and that creates surprise. I felt that Manzolini was infusing this wax portrait with a magic, with an embodiment of the self that would last. The same way we do with our writing! I think she was placing inside it some spirit of her own so that we might see it centuries down the line and find her there. Which has of course happened. It’s a haunting object. The energy is what that repetition is all about. And this harnessing or calling up of energy is the spell she placed on this wax replica of her form and the driving force of the piece itself.
In that same piece, there’s a lot of internal rhyming. Do you find it difficult to rhyme within a prose piece? What sort of rhythm are you looking for when you write/edit?
Rhyme is challenging because it can easily be comic or overdone. But in recent years I’ve embraced it as a way to go over the cliff or over the waterfall of a piece of writing in a barrel, to purposefully give a little too much when the emotional stage of a piece might call for it. And once you give yourself permission to repeat sounds, you can simply follow the music. Once I give this horse of rhyme its head, loosen the reins, it just runs and runs. So I follow that instinct. In a lyric prose piece, I don’t think the sense of the sounds are that much different than in a poem, and we each make the rules whenever we write. We decide what gets done where, and hope it works, and decide to revise if it doesn’t. The difficulty for me comes in reining it back in for the next piece where I want a more measured sense of the music. I find the overdoing of music and the duende of that extremity a bit addictive, a bit of an endorphin rush.
That first sentence in “Wax Portrait of a Marriage” ending in, “not on the instinct but on the wit” is a really profound way of perceiving different intentions. Can you talk about where that thought process for that line came from?
I think marriages are challenging, and I hope this piece communicates that. People act like it’s a natural state to be married, but I don’t think that’s the case for everyone. It’s strange how partnership like this comes with a bliss and also with a curse. So that sentence—about surviving in a communal way, alongside others, hivelike—references the fact that you must move beyond the ‘instinct’ and make some savvy choices, think on your feet, be quick, if you are going to survive within this duality which, especially if you are a woman, will likely quash your shining self. You aren’t traveling forward on the things your body and your nervous system have learned over time through evolution. You are creating brain wirings for survival, and you must use them to get through this and not disappear.
Each title has a “/” after it. Why is that? Are there more poems that are part of “Wax Portraits” in this series? What was your intention with the connection between pieces?
Yes—this is a marker for the visual division of the title from the work, which I felt was appropriate for a piece about a work of visual art. I was thinking about the carving tools Manzolini must have used to create the wax sculptures that were her legacy, and let this simple line reference their sharpness. It demarcates—and in the book it marks a particular kind of piece, a piece grouped with this particular ‘wax portrait’ series, that is different from the other pieces, which consist of a collection of pieces tracing the narrative of a scientist in a laboratory as they engage in a series of experiments investigating the nature of the body.
What themes or topics does your writing return to?
Oh, more and more I realize that I am a science writer of sorts. I am obsessed with the natural world. I’m obsessed with the nature of the body, how corporeal we are even if we feel spiritual. No matter what I am writing about—love, family, identity, illness—that element is there. So the themes change, but the materials, the images and threads, stay very similar in some ways. I’m obsessed with the dangers of technology. I’m obsessed with the way soil smells and the way insect wings look. I live on two acres of land in New Hampshire and that space feeds my writing—the alone version of me facing the world with no filters but my own lenses. So the topics change—wasn’t it Louise Gluck who said she invoked a different ‘style’ with each book?—but those threads continue. Making different clothings or quilts, maybe, with different patterns or designs, but the cotton doesn’t change, the wool doesn’t change, the dye flows the same, the pace and the needle remain constant.
What are some of your favorite books? Which authors have inspired your work?
This is always such a tough question. But I’ve been reading a lot of amazing novels lately—and love how the novel is being reinvented. I love Matt Bell’s work and Max Porter’s Lanny, Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation. The work of Sabrina Orah Mark is absolutely brilliant. In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado is a nonfiction book everyone should read. And poets of course—like Chen Chen, an amazing friend who is so intelligent and fluid, Jericho Brown’s The Tradition is amazing, I’m always inspired by the way Cate Marvin uses a line break—and of course the work that all our work is built on. My life was changed by Dickinson, was changed by Lorca and Rilke—I could of course go on and on…
What are you working on now?
I’m currently working on both a new book of poetry, including poems like “Mansplaining” and “Endangered Ghazal with Telegram and Natural World” which explore some of the complex political and existential challenges of our age, some of the ‘endangerments’ we are face to face with, and also a secret-ish larger prose project which may or may not see the light of day at some point in the future. Who can tell?
Jennifer Militello is the Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. She is the author of the forthcoming hybrid fiction collection Identifying the Pathogen (Tupelo Press, 2025); the memoir Knock Wood, winner of the Dzanc Nonfiction Prize; and five collections of poetry, including most recently The Pact (Tupelo Press/Shearsman Books, 2021). Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, and Poetry. She teaches in the MFA program at New England College.
