The Book of Props
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
The narrators in this mesmerizing collection often desire to hold time still — in moments of love, yes, but also when feeling fully located in a particular place or experience. Yet they also acknowledge that to hold time still would mean the death of love, the death of experience. Thus, the grounding and locating sensory images that surround us — and the eye that apprehends them — become greatly important. At the heart of the book is “What Night Says to the Empty Boat,” a sequence of lyric poems in which the three main characters — Justine, Clarence, and Andy — drift to and from, together and apart, viewed through the dispassionate lens of the unspoken fourth main character. An artistic and philosophical endeavor to place oneself in the world, this stunning collection is a wholehearted embrace of being, where technique and subject come together in a remarkable combination of personal lyric and formal innovation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Transformations from the everyday to the wondrous and/ or haunting are everywhere in Miller's elegant second book. The poems are at once dreamlike and fervent in their will to cleave to the material world. "Sleep gives the body back its mouth," writes Miller in one poem. Elsewhere, the shouts of a beaten man become "flashbulbs/ striking the river," and a lightning storm becomes a meditation on loss and clarity. In the title poem, everyday objects a hammer, glasses, a cup, a matchbook take on mythic significance, as if they had souls of their own, and a lover's kiss becomes "another object pressed/ between them." Miller (Only the Senses Sleep) mixes what is with what we perceive and what could be without explanation or commentary. A series of poems labeled "notes for a film in verse" continue Miller's exploration of the intersection of observation and artifice, this time through whimsical characters a tightrope walker hiking telephone wires across the country, a pair of distant, angels talking to scarecrows, a girl fascinated by cement trucks, a drawbridge operator in a bar. Miller remains a poet to watch, and one who strives to "separate/ the seeing from what's seen."
