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Synopsis
A new & selected collection providing a comprehensive overview of an inventve, daring, and insightful lyric poet.
Library Journal
Miller (August Zero, LJ 9/15/93) enters poetic midcareer with this selection from five previous volumes plus 15 new poems that focus primarily on her father's death. From the start, Miller has written about love, desperation, and loss for an audience that is not married to traditional narrative, syntax, and prosody. In the beautifully conceived "Picnic," Miller's version of a "Dejeuner sur l'herbe" scene explodes into a sexually charged epiphany that defies the sterile passivity of high-tech culture: "this couldn't take place/ on metromedia television, because the message/ is the corsage the woman has on." Miller's disjointed syntax will frustrate some readers: "Well my Cadillac now that the hog herding has begun/ big ones spray gunned/ is this the permission we longed for/ not in prose or stone but in action?" Others will read these poems over and over, attempting to piece together details of love (between women) and locale. Recommended for libraries lacking her strongest collection, American Odalisque (Copper Canyon, 1987, o.p.)-Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York