Synopses & Reviews
Six Objects That Are Mine and One That Isn’t
After a day of doctors and work
and money and even
the painstaking steering
to not hit that jerk
in the parking garage,
the soft hermetic
closing of my door sounds
like an army of angels
laying down their guns.
And my kitchen, the last
brown shards of sunset
sliding their blades
across the cabinets,
suddenly is paradise, the faucet
playing small creek music
as six objects on the sill—
two horses, a soapstone god,
the clock, the cup and bowl—
hold quiet court with the one
I’ll never fully own, the plant
turning its panels to light
and mining a life
from its fistful of soil.
Review
"In Amy Miller's The Trouble with New England Girls, love can make you leave, a
kiss can make you stay, and floral apologies are so endangered they're illegal but
offered anyway. These poems track a wolf through Oregon and track grief across
its shifting portraits, but whatever the metaphors pursued here, you never see the
end coming. Miller knows what one line can do to another and how an image can
make a poem open. Beauty is found in laundromats and pictures of food and from
the perspective of drones, in all the places we never expected to find ourselves, and
every shadow between ourselves and home."
Traci Brimhall, author of Saudade and Our Lady of the Ruins
Review
"These poems brim with keen metaphors and spotlight observations. Intimate descriptions
are conveyed like speaking to a friend, and with a humor that animates
wide-ranging experiences from lovers to laundromats, even grief. Amy writes with
tenderness while wielding metaphors like signal flags. This is assured writing. You
will want more. I do."
Allan Peterson, author of Fragile Acts and Precarious
About the Author
Amy Miller's writing has appeared in Nimrod, Rattle, Willow Springs, Zyzzyva, The Oregonian, Fine Gardening, and Asimov's Science Fiction, and her latest chapbooks are I Am on a River and Cannot Answer (BOAAT Press) and Rough House (White Knuckle Press). Amy won the Cultural Center of Cape Cod National Poetry Competition, judged by Tony Hoagland, the Jack Grapes Poetry Prize from Cultural Weekly, and the Earl Weaver Baseball Writing Prize from Cobalt Review, and was a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize, the Tinderbox Prize, and the 49th Parallel Award. Her article "Anatomy of a Poetry Book" appears in the 2017 Poet's Market.