<p>A collection that explores inherited trauma on an individual and communal level, from a National Poetry Series–winning poet who “refus[es] the mind’s limits” (Carol Muske-Dukes)\nBorderline Fortune is a meditation on intangible family inheritance—of unresolved intergenerational conflicts and traumas in particular—set against the backdrop of our planetary inheritance as humans. As species go extinct and glaciers melt, Teresa K. Miller asks what we owe one another and what it means to echo one’s ancestors’ grief and fear. Drawing on her family history, from her great-grandfather’s experience as a schoolteacher on an island in the Bering Strait to her father’s untimely death, as well as her pursuit of regenerative horticulture, Miller seeks through these beautifully crafted poems to awaken from the intergenerational trance and bear witness to our current moment with clarity and attention.</p>

Borderline Fortune (Penguin Poets)

Self-Help

Miller, Teresa K.

Relationships

Penguin??Books

Poetry. The death of a parent by vehicular homicide, the difficulty of meeting the needs of children with severe autism, the dissolution of identity and relationships in an era of unending genocide and terror by war—these three poetic sequences piece together an intimate mourning, circuitous and sewn, a symptom of grief and the recursive process of grieving. Each poem of this assured debut, encoded by fragmentary attentions that surface before the mind shuts out all signals of time passing without the missing, is a crystalline approximation of coping with loss. Through an exacting poetics of impression and submerge, sped sutures broken thoughts, snippets of conversation, incidents both witnessed and obscured into unexpected configurations until the scar that remains becomes yet another facet language can't account for. "They are so still you can pet the fuzz, but they shudder // I turned the desk on the slant to roll toward it instead of away / only the corner of the corkboard stayed on the wall // Portuguese acres of gnarled brown trees / bark peeled off in wide black rings // In every storefront a church and a man who wants to walk me home to my boyfriend because my skin is so soft // Except there is no cure, only desperate offerings / oxygen therapy, elimination diet, blood transfusion, chelation // We speak in tongues, writhe on the ground/ broken headed//[.]"

sped

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Sidebrow Books

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Books by Miller, Teresa K.