Shine - (Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry) by Joseph Millar (Paperback)

About the Book

Joseph Millar's lyrical poems explore work, love, filial connection, life, and death. This is Millar's sixth collection, and it reaches a deeper, more sonic level than his usual narrative voice. A collection of half songs rendered in a hardscrabble lyricism, they are propelled by their shifting, irregular rhymes, half rhymes, and off rhymes. The poems' subjects grow from moments of daily life and their deeper obsessions--love, work, death, desire--and the making of art itself. Touched with more humor than earlier work, and with an unpredictable timing that seems to listen to itself as it travels down the page, the poems are part wonder and part reflection, carried along by their music.

Book Synopsis

Poems that arise from the currents of felt experience.

Joseph Millar's lyrical poems explore work, love, filial connection, life, and death. This is Millar's sixth collection, and it reaches a deeper, more sonic level than his usual narrative voice. A collection of half songs rendered in a hardscrabble lyricism, they are propelled by their shifting, irregular rhymes, half rhymes, and off rhymes. The poems' subjects grow from moments of daily life and their deeper obsessions--love, work, death, desire--and the making of art itself. Touched with more humor than earlier work, and with an unpredictable timing that seems to listen to itself as it travels down the page, the poems are part wonder and part reflection, carried along by their music.

Review Quotes

"Joseph Millar possesses a lyric intelligence that exalts the quotidian, that's deeply humane. His poems track and transfigure friendship, old age, silence, and love's effervescent intimacies. But his lyricism, his language, doesn't enlarge the distance between what's observed and the self; instead, it brings the world closer to the body. All that blossoms, all that decays surrounds the speaker in these poems. Millar trusts poetry to reveal something vital. After reading this book, I trust him and his poems."-- "Eduardo Corral, author of Slow Lightning and Guillotine"

"The difficult grace of dailiness and the defiant resilience of the spirit have always been at the heart of Millar's poetry. Book by book, line by carefully carved line, Millar has been writing the finest poetry about work and material presence in our world since those of his exemplar, Philip Levine. Millar's elemental belief in those around him, an unfailing tenderness, and his fabulous jazz-inflected diction are the polishes by which the American grain of these poems is made luminous. Read this book; watch it shine."-- "David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour"

"What Joe Millar's carefully wrought and elegantly shaped poems remind us in their sonic beauty and power, is that the rhyme is a kind of reassurance of grace, a surprising harmony that arrives with the sense of rightful order in a world of mortal chaos and emotional shadows. These poems shine for their splendid engineering, machines much like the new stars of his title poem, that keep 'shining on life and death.'"-- "Kwame Dawes, author of Sturge Town, Norton 2024"

About the Author

Joseph Millar is the author of Overtime, Fortune, Blue Rust, Kingdom, and Dark Harvest. His work has won a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches in the low-residency MFA in Writing Program at Pacific University in Oregon and lives in Richmond, California.