Knock Wood: A Memoir in Essays

(Paperback)

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Winner of the 2018 Dzanc Nonfiction Prize "Knock Wood is an absolute wonder, and Jennifer Militello is at the top of her form." -Andre Dubus III, author of Townie and The House of Sand and Fog In Knock Wood, the first nonfiction collection by award-winning poet Jennifer Militello, a knock on wood to ward off illness sets in motion a chain of events and memories that call into question the very structure of time. Anchored by a wooden ring, Militello explores her life through the lens of three intertwined elements: the story of a mentally ill aunt in an abusive marriage; a high school romance with a boy who eventually dies of a heroin overdose; and an extra-marital affair characterized by an otherworldly connection. Cause and effect reverse as significant events-an arrest for a felony committed in high school, a trip by train to meet an illicit lover, and a suicide attempt on those same New York tracks-seem to influence one another outside of time and space. As Militello delicately threads each memory to the next, she explores the themes of family damage and the precarious ties of love. Militello has been recognized many times for her work in poetry and prose, including honors such as the Yeats Poetry Prize from the W.B. Yeats Society of New York, the Betty Gabehart Poetry Prize, and the Tupelo Press First Book Award. Her collection Body Thesaurus was named one of the top poetry books of 2013 by Best American Poetry.

Reviews

"These are hard tales of relationships gone haywire, the pull of love and the helplessness of mental illness and drug addiction. Militello makes order out of chaos sentence after sounding sentence, and succeeds in helping us at least try to understand human frailties. ... By the end of this contemplative and fascinating exploration, the reader may be moved to knock wood for good luck." Booklist "Militellos part-memoir, part-poetic contemplation smooths out time and space so that we may see the All in front of us; it shows us that there is no such thing as an isolated incident, that everything weve lived continues to happen within us, that loss transcends love transcends time....She taps into a collective heartbreak, one we have, at different points, inflicted on ourselves by knowing better than to love the ones we choose to love." The Rumpus "Knock Wood is a poets memoir, filled with rich, beautiful language and metaphor. ... Militellos prose is haunting and sharp, her emotional nakedness a gift to the broken shards inside each of us." Mom Egg Review "Speaking the music that exists within barren and uncompromising landscapes takes not only courage, but art. These Jennifer Militello has in abundance." Tupelo Quarterly With the lyrically textured and crystalline prose of a master poet, Militello's Knock Wood captures the elusive and mysterious nature of time itself, of our one dance on this earth that may not be our last, this urgent need of ours to love and to be loved, our propensity to fail at both and to try again, to suffer and to rise and to fall and yes, to perhaps live once more. This brave and mesmerizing memoir lays bare all of this with sentence after evocative sentence whose shimmering beauty I will never forget. Knock Wood is an absolute wonder, and Jennifer Militello is at the top of her form. Andre Dubus III, author of Townie and The House of Sand and Fog "The twenty-nine short essays that make up Knock Wood delight and astound. Each piece is as multifaceted as a gemstone, deeply hued, image-dense, burnished by perspective, precise as a poets tear. But each piece also links in surprising ways, creating a narrative that offers the pleasures of deeper meditations on time, memory, and destiny. Readers with Knock Wood close at hand are lucky indeed." Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs "The essays in Knock Wood are perfect and petrified: to look inside is to witness the remains of transformation, once wood becomes stone becomes a blood that sins becomes an arrival, at a train station, and who will be waiting" Lily Hoang, author of A Bestiary

Author Bio

Jennifer Militello is the author of A Camouflage of Specimens and Garments (Tupelo Press, 2016), called positively bewitching by Publishers Weekly, Body Thesaurus (Tupelo Press, 2013), named one of the top books of 2013 by Best American Poetry, and Flinch of Song, winner of the Tupelo Press First Book Award. Her poetry and nonfiction have been published widely in such journals as American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry, and Tin House. She teaches in the MFA program at New England College.