Jennifer Militello

"Shipyard, shipyard, why aren't I home?/ Even when you give me one, it travels." Luscious verbal texturing and lyric slipperiness give Jennifer Militello's chapbook, Anchor Chain, Open Sail, a sensuality and braininess akin to modern dance. Dickinson is her poetic ancestor; Szporluk, her cousin. Enclosed here are surprising and mysterious messages, urgently uttered, and well worth listening for.   -Kathy Fagan, author of The Charm

Jennifer Militello makes her way through an incomplete world and comes out with testaments to the elegance found in all that is missing, declaring that "there is a hinge here, broken/and fixed, pinned through vacancy's fist." Where many would find a trail of laments, she sees a celebration in progress. What sets these poems apart is that they are not songs of praise so much as the distant humming of someone who gathers, from "the sacred chore of wanting to die," the precise words for the long mending ritual.   -Dionisio D. Martinez

"To walk into Flinch of Song is to enter a very particular kind of house, the kind whose corners sing as you pass them by, whose rooms promise a certain light -- profoundly interior -- and whose inhabitants seem to know you from the time before you were born. The poems call out, saying Here's freedom! just as Emily Dickinson once did upon closing the door to her room, happy to be inside something so large. That these poems also glitter with loss and pain makes Jennifer Militello's first book nothing less than a powerfully honest account of what it takes to survive when we find such freedom."

          -- Carol Ann Davis, co-editor of Crazyhorse and judge for the Tupelo Press First Book Contest

Best New Poets 2008   

"[One] comes to realize that the adjectives 'new' and 'emerging' are mere technicalities in this instance. Although none of the poets included here have published a full-length book of poetry, many are MFA students or graduates, and chapbook authors, and most have already seen some of their poems published in the most renowned and exclusive journals in North America.... The result is a remarkably diverse mix of poems." - BookPleasures

"It's a nervy thing for an anthology to label itself Best New Poets, but once again this collection lives up to its name. It's a rich and readable selection, reflecting no party-line aesthetic, and attesting to the formidable promise of the emerging generation." - David Wojahn"