Synopses & Reviews
Review
"Wayne Miller has written an astonishing book-length sequence whose ambitions remind me of nothing less than those of George Oppen's
Of Being Numerous and Zbigniew Herbert's
Report from the Besieged City. His city is utterly of our own dumbfounding moment in history, but its gravitational pull would feel familiar to the citizens of ancient Rome or Edo or Machu Picchu. This book moved and entertained me in the oddest, most compelling ways. Miller's scope is as large as anyone's in his generation." David Rivard
Review
The urban spaces explored in Millers third collection (after
The Book of Props) are less evocative of Whitmans tumultuous Mannahatta than of T.S. Eliots Unreal City,” peopled not by rushing pedestrians and aggressive cabbies but by shadows, ghostly memories, and the poets own brooding consciousness. Millers unnamed city seems born of dreams but not aspirations; it has a past but not a recorded history. Everywhere there is the sense of time irretrievably lost (Porchlights/ coming on, the theater/ boarded and sealed shut/ with the posters of exhausted shows”), perhaps for the better. Like Eliot, Miller reveals a flair for haunting imagery, noting the panoramic dark of a rail car” or the neoned, crisscrossing,/ paperflecked streets,” but it is the metaphysics of silent despair that he captures most effectively: The houses one by one abandoning, each as if a wave has rushed inside./ Withdrawing, it leaves a trail of possessions in the yard.” Millers meditative approach to his subject may seem sedate, almost ethereal, but his attempts to link the symbolic significance of cities with the deep human needs that made them inevitable are often riveting.”
Library Journal"Wayne Miller has written an astonishing book-length sequence whose ambitions remind me of nothing less than those of George Oppen's Of Being Numerous and Zbigniew Herbert's Report from the Besieged City. His city is utterly of our own dumbfounding moment in history, but its gravitational pull would feel familiar to the citizens of ancient Rome or Edo or Machu Picchu. This book moved and entertained me in the oddest, most compelling ways. Miller's scope is as large as anyone's in his generation." David Rivard, author of Otherwise Elsewhere and Sugartown
The city where Millers third book takes place is decidedly modern. . . . At the same time it is vexed by some ancient concerns: it is, perhaps has long been, a city at war. . . .It is a post-9/11, post-imperial, unjust city, one that tries to get past persistent fears, to find a space for private life while sirens choke back their warnings, and silence curls inside the shell that refused to explode.” Publishers Weekly
Review
Wayne Miller [is] among the best poets in the USA at the moment [. . .]
The City, Our City is through-composed, coherent in the unity of its parts, and terribly moving.”
Notre Dame ReviewMillers combination of allegory, stark imagism, surrealist panache, and sophisticated tonal movement create a poem that is as dynamic as the architectural space of his city.” Micah Bateman, Kenyon Review Online
However grimly real, some of these poems are also truly beautiful [. . .] The City, Our City [reminds] us that poets still know its their job to think big and to find all sorts of ways to make their poems big as well.” Herman Asarnow, The Cincinnati Review
[A] wide-ranging, fascinating series of poems that [. . . has] the city as character at its center, the city as a collective soul, the city as idea.” David Blomenberg, Sycamore Review
The urban spaces explored in Millers third collection (after The Book of Props) are less evocative of Whitmans tumultuous Mannahatta than of T. S. Eliots Unreal City [. . .] Like Eliot, Miller reveals a flair for haunting imagery [. . .] but it is the metaphysics of silent despair that he captures most effectively[.] [Millers] attempts to link the symbolic significance of cities with the deep human needs that made them inevitable are often riveting.” Fred Muratori, Library Journal
The muse of this exquisite collection is an imagined contemporary metropolis [. . .] that thrives simultaneously with the lost cities it has risen from and falls toward, allowing the poets urbanites to grasp the continuity of human tragedy and joy.” The Kansas City Star
Synopsis
A William Carlos William Award Finalist for 2012A Kansas City Star Top Book of 2012
A Library Journal Top Winter Poetry Pick
A series of semi-mythologized, symbolic narratives interspersed with dramatic monologues, the poems collected in The City, Our City showcase the voice of a young poet striking out, dramatically, emphatically, to stake his claim on the City.” It is an unnamed, crowded place where the human questions and observations found in almost any citypast, present, and futurering out with urgency. These poemsin turn elegiac, celebratory, haunting, grave, and joyfulgive hum to our modern experience, to those caught up in the Citys immensity, and announce the arrival of a major new contemporary poet.
Synopsis
FINALIST FOR THE WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS AWARD
A breakout collection that showcases the voice of a young poet striking out, dramatically, emphatically, to stake his claim on "the City"--an unnamed, crowded place filled with gunmen, lovers, children, neighbors, builders, soldiers, professors, bouncers, and widowers.
In this series of semi-mythologized, symbolic narratives interspersed with dramatic monologues, Wayne Miller presents a city laden with "kisses in doorways, weapons / and sculptures, concerts / and fistfights, sex toys and votives, / engines and metaphors." And yet the City, both unidentifiable and readily familiar, is also a place where the human questions and observations found in almost any city--past, present, and future--ring out with urgency.
These poems--in turn elegiac, celebratory, haunting, grave, and joyful--give hum to our modern experience, to all those caught up in the City's immensity.