Paper Banners - by Jane Miller (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A herald of desire, mortality, and the mission of poetry itself, Jane Miller's Paper Banners catalogs the intimate experiences that create a life, hoping that "what will survive of us is love."

A herald of desire, suffering, mortality, and the mission of poetry itself, Jane Miller's Paper Banners "say the cosmos/ isn't hostile/ yet strangles a dove /with one hand." Against this angst, Miller steps outside of history to contemplate voices of love, aging, and artmaking. Many poems are addressed to family members, friends, and young poets, or pay homage to familiar figures taken by time or tragedy, including Virginia Woolf, Osip Mandelstam, and the Song Dynasty poet Li Qingzhao. In clear, short lines, these poems harken to ancient banderoles, or pennants, which announced rallying cries on the lances of knights and mottoes on the flags of ships. Here, Miller's Paper Banners are made of images of the American Southwest and scrutinize its political and physical landscape. Like skywriting streamed in white smoke, this collection bears its message on the wind, its words addressed to anyone. As Miller catalogs the intimate experiences that make up a life-friendships, loves, dreams, our human connection to the environment--Paper Banners becomes a hope that "what will survive of us is love."

Review Quotes

"Jane Miller is an extraordinary poet... an astoundingly supple voice." -Jorie Graham

"Jane Miller is by far one of our best poets writing today . . . Miller is like the NASA space station of poetry: out of this world, yet of it, and still looking down. From her peculiar and important vantage she blows us kisses in the form of images that hit their mark." -- Lambda Book Report

"Miller's writing is brassy but earnest, and she suffuses her approach to fraught social politics with humor and exuberant interest in people." --Publishers Weekly

"Reading Jane Miller's poetry is like channel-surfing on acid: her deliberately interrupted narrative warps and weaves and makes the familiar strange and the strange recognizable as something you might have put away in a shoebox." --LA Weekly

"Though history may be written by the victors, Miller demonstrates that it is not wholly stable, that legend and myth create opportunities for revision and reclamation, and that the future is yet to be authored." --The Critical Flame

"Her lusher effusions gain astringency from an achingly palpable heartbreak, and from an increased awareness of technology, commodity, politics: swoon meets zoom." --Boston Review

"Book by book, Jane Miller has evolved a mode, a voice, a palette and landscape entirely her own. If she were a painter, one might describe it as a descendant of cubism, a composition of multiple planes and reflections that appears to emerge out of itself, true to laws of its own nature, and yet is disturbingly recognizable, continuously suggestive, intimate and beautiful. Her subject is love and illusion and their revelation about each other."--W. S. Merwin

"Excellent . . . Miller is able to go inside her subjects and draw readers with her. That experience makes this collection one for all libraries."--Diane Scharper, Publishers Weekly, STARRED review

About the Author

Jane Miller has written twelve books, most recently Paper Banners, Who Is Trixie the Trasher? and Other Questions, and Working Time: Essays on Poetry, Culture, and Travel. For over thirty years, she has performed her creative work and lectured on literature and the fine arts at universities, colleges, libraries, community centers, and public arts venues. The recipient of a Wallace Award, she has also been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Western States Book Award, and the Audre Lorde Award. Miller served as a professor for many years in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Arizona--including a stint as its director--and as a visiting poet at the University of Texas Michener Center for Writers in Austin.