Like Conrad's Marlow, Joseph Millar speaks with fierce compassion and the authority of hard-won experience. In his remarkable third collection, Blue Rust, he lays down "the shield of irony" without taking up the consolations of easy sentiment or detached despair. The result is an unstrained originality: lyrics that avoid the metronome, leaps of imagination in which the associative logic never trails off into self-indulgent incoherence. Millar looks hard at a world that is doomed and beautiful. What sets Blue Rust apart is its ability to honor both sides.

Blue Rust (Carnegie Mellon Poetry (Paperback))

Literature & Fiction

Millar, Joseph

Poetry

Carnegie-Mellon University Press

Overtime, Joseph Millar’s first book of poetry, both traditionally elegiac and formally unexpected―aims at the overlap between art and the everyday grind of work and single fatherhood. Here we find poems of loss and grief, alongside poems of working-class celebration that hum with the sound of wind in the ladder racks and miles of telephone wire. Overtime is a book of poetry whose chief concern is not art for its own sake but rather the artistic visions the everyday struggles of life provide when paid the right attention. A poet deeply sunk into William Carlos Williams’ American Grain, Millar grounds his poems in the details and small mysteries of everyday life and labor. Whether the speaker is murmuring a song to the beloved in poems like “Love Pirates” or “Listener,” imagining the travails of a Native American war chief in “Sitting Bull in Canada,” or considering his own inevitable death in “Heart Attack,” Millar tells a story plainly, moving from lyric to narrative and back again in language charged with duende and force. As Yusef Komunyakaa has written, “Millar is a poet we can believe.”

Overtime (Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary Series: Poetry)

Kingdom extends Joseph Millar’s articulate devotion to the astonishments of daily life―their mingled beauty and pain. As in his first three books, Millar, like the late Philip Levine, has a keen eye for the hardscrabble details of working-class lives―from California’s wheat fields to the Lehigh Valley to the rooftops of Paris and a host of other locales “down here on earth in the kingdom.” Perhaps more fully than any recent book, this one calls to mind Dylan Thomas’s assessment that the best poems “show us that we are alone and not alone in the unknown world, that our bliss and suffering are forever shared, and forever all our own.” Kingdom shows Millar working at the height of his powers, sifting the “rag and bone shop of the heart” for songs and stories. It’s his best book yet.

Kingdom (Carnegie Mellon Poetry)

Powerful poems about men and women at the margins.\nDark Harvest showcases two decades of Joseph Millar’s finest poetic work, including his beloved and award-winning poems centered on the unseen men and women at the margins of American life. Millar's poems don’t favor beauty over suffering, nor do they reach for knowledge over mystery—instead, his words carry forward their Whitmanic imperatives: to turn away from nothing, to be awash in contradictions.

Dark Harvest: New and Selected Poems, 2001–2020 (Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series)

Shine (Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series)

Joseph Millar's poems come out of the American landscape like runaway diesel trucks loaded with miners, electricians, waitresses, ditch diggers, mechanics, factory workers, the homeless, the hopeless, and the lost. These are the voices poetry has classically ignored, finally speaking to us through Millar's expertly detailed lines. Here is the poetry of work, its dignity, pain, pathos, and oppression rendered in poems so tight they tick like clocks, or bombs. Joseph Millar grew up in Pennsylvania and received an MA degree from Johns Hopkins University. He spent 25 years in the San Francisco Bay area, working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines and he has won fellowships from Montalvo Center for the Arts and from Oregon Literary Arts. He now teaches at Mount Hood Community College, in Oregon.

Overtime

Eastern Washington Univ Pr

Fortune

Eastern Washington University

A collection of poetry by Joseph Millar.

This long, sequential poem offers a sustained, elliptical, and lyrical glimpse into one of the poet's epic obsessions. Fan's of Millar's poetry will recognize "Ocean" as a stylistic departure from his recent collections, a work that fans out into the musical, shape-shifting territories reminiscent of the mid-century Spanish-language poets.

Ocean

Tavern Books

Bookstore Clerks & Significant Others: Tsunami Press 1

Biographies & Memoirs

Laux, Dorianne

Hoffman, Nina Kiriki

Dickman, Matthew

McGriff, Michael

Babbs, Ken

Witte, John

Scates, Maxine

Titus, Tom A.

Müller, Erik

Ihsan, Valerie

Rhodes, D. S.

Landfield, Scott

Root, Jenny

Hull, Meli

Bookman, Elly

Yoder, Kelsey

Mosley, Mose Tuzik

Dean, Bronwynn

Craven, Bob

Ellerhoff, S. G.

Casey, Deb

Cutean, Brian

Hagen, Cecelia

LaFleur, Jorah

McKenzie, Carter

Müller, Eve

Historical

Tsunami Press

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Books by Millar, Joseph