Praise for Post-
Winner of the UNT Rilke Prize and the Colorado Book Award for poetry
"In these poems, we see the way the world around us is layered by confrontation, love, and remembrance. And whether it is the birth of a child, the death of a father, the various ways we’ve found to kill each other, or the aftermath of a riot in response to those killings, we carry it all forward with us, in memory and action, and we give it to those who follow us."—Adrian Matejka
“Part stark elegy where the ghosts we carry are relentlessly tied to us, part unrelenting look into today’s world of social media, loneliness, and violence, and part fierce celebration of survival, Post- is a gorgeous and complex book of poems that both startles and soothes.”—Ada Limón
“What do we owe the living and the dead? It's a question that confronts all of us, personally and collectively, during our time on earth. In Post-, Wayne Miller engages this question with grim wit and empathy, strong music and imagery, in poems alive to the intersections of the domestic and political. I found myself, chagrined, involved, in every poem—this is a moving, thought-provoking book.”—Dana Levin
“This is poetry at its most powerful: instrument of change, defense against the commonplace of mall shooters and hoax bombs, deeply entered wisdom of the body in both birth and dying, and a bastion against loss and forgetting. Wayne Miller’s Post- doesn’t take this century lying down, it is a ringing rejoinder to those who say poetry does not matter. In Miller’s lines, we hear the ancient magic of sorrow transformed to hope, elegy bent back around to ode.”—D. A. Powell
“Miller’s poems are subdued, restrained. For the engaged reader they move ever so slightly, like plates at a fault line, but that slight movement leads to thundering effects—awesome and demolishing.”—American Microreviews & Interviews
“With unwavering insight, Post- breaks free of temporal, spatial, and ideological boundaries to show the thread of common humanity within all of us.”—Pleiades
“Witty and solemn, stoic and nimble . . . Wayne Miller favors brief lines and couplets, but his tercets and quatrains are just as lithe and whipping. . . . In incisive, jolting poems of the here-and-now, he takes measure of debt as a legacy, and the repercussions of constant mass shootings. Shrewdly pithy and nuanced, edgy and commiserating, Miller’s poems are beacons.”—Booklist
“In a fourth book that is as ambitious as his previous work, yet both quieter and sharper, Wayne Miller raises important questions about complicity and responsibility. . . . Miller often probes these personal and social issues in eerie, intimate lyrics. . . . As its plain yet audacious title suggests, Miller’s latest is both a development and a departure, and its best work elucidates contemporary life’s unsettling realities with an uncanny candor.”—Publishers Weekly
"Volumes of Miller’s precise and resonant language flood every space within this book, creating a world of both gritty intensity and thoughtful poise. As a collection, Post- carries significant momentum, as the living spaces within it evolve and change as time surges forward."—The Adroit Journal
“A fascinating and wonderful book . . . The poems have the function of all elegies: to lament, to praise, to console. What is most admirable about them is how they use a minimalist’s eye, bending tone and making the most of economy of language. . . . Post- is a work of serious craft.”—Tupelo Quarterly
“Extraordinary poems, chilling in their incisive witnessing of social issues, wise in their perceptiveness about what it is to be human.”—FIELD
“Recent poets Miller brings to mind include Robert Hass and Louise Glück, and perhaps Czesław Miłosz. . . . Post- stands out among many recent collections.”—32 Poems
Praise for Wayne Miller
“Wayne Miller is among the best poets in the USA at the moment.”—Notre Dame Review
“Miller makes a vast impact using the smallest stroke.”—The New Yorker
“A singular figure in American poetry.” —Colorado Review
“Miller remains a poet to watch, and one who strives to ‘separate/ the seeing from what’s seen.”—Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)
06/01/2016
This fourth collection from Miller (after The City, Our City) is a fairly general meditation upon loss. From strained metaphors (as when a sonogram is called a "2-D cockpit" or a house's exterior "derma") to pat final lines (see "Inside the Book" and "Post-Elegy"), the work here is self-conscious. The most organic poems (i.e., those that don't rush headlong toward poeticism) are the simple ones, not overwrought but understated, as in "For Harper, 20 Months Old"—"I imagine your sleep/ as a flashlit tent" and "Through the monitor/ you come to us/ aerated/ like tapwater"—or some of the brief aphorisms in "Landings" (e.g., "It is good to remember:/ butterflies/ will sip blood from an open wound"). Those are the poems that get closest to the blurb that likens Miller to Charles Simic, a likeness otherwise absent and thus a poor reference point. VERDICT Ultimately, despite comparisons, this work contains none of Simic's dark charm and humor.—Stephen Morrow, Hilliard, OH
