New Hampshire Poet Laureate, Jennifer Militello, joins us to present her new book, Identifying the Pathogen: An Inquiry.
Composed as a lab notebook recording various surgeries, autopsies, and experiments, Identifying the Pathogen tells the story of a scientist on an obsessive quest to document an ailment that resists classification. The book considers the body in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and is woven through with the story of Anna Morandi Manzolini—an eighteenth-century Italian anatomist and artist who struggled to support a husband suffering from depression—as well as several accounts detailing a ruptured appendix, a splintered cello, and an ill-fated rock climbing excursion.