The subjects and settings of Joseph Mills' poems range from Laundromats, groceries, and coffee shops, to cemeteries, the stars over the Grand Canyon, and even Purgatory, which is seen as a combination "dry cleaner/car wash." These poems, which deal mainly with traveling and motion, explore the simple encounters that can suggest the complexity of human interactions. In everyday language, the narrator considers topics such as how difficult it can be to find a poem to read at a wedding, what happens when a person drives non-stop from Salt Lake to Chicago, and why it would be convenient if people wore labels like wine bottles, so "we would have a better idea/who might improve with age/and who we should enjoy now."

Somewhere During the Spin Cycle

Literature & Fiction

Mills, Professor of Surgery Chief of Vascular Surgery Joseph

Poetry

Press 53

"Joseph Mills is a poet who understands that Love's great nemesis isn't Hate but Time. Time and again, the poems in Love and Other Collisions explore the inherent pain created when Love and Time meet. This book stands as a chronicle of the speaker's growth from a hopeful youth to a father carving out the best life he can for his own children to a man who is a helpless witness to his mother's battle with Alzheimer's disease. In the words of one poem, Mills "show[s] how you [can] make something of your life if only you [can] stand enough punishment over the years." Love and Other Collisions is at once ambitious, unflinching, and tender-It is definitely a must-read." - Shaindel Beers, author of A Brief History of Time

Love and Other Collisions

"Sending Christmas Cards to Huck &amp; Hamlet by Joseph Mills is one of the most original collections of poetry I have ever encountered-original because it treats the whole world of books, poems, stories, fairy tales not only as being somehow more real than reality itself but as our most important lifelines to reality itself. There is about this book a sense of everything happening for the first time, even those literary events that seem to happen over and over. What a pleasure this book gives the reader." - Anthony Abbot, author of New and Selected Poems: 1989-2009

Sending Christmas Cards to Huck and Hamlet

This Miraculous Turning is a book that turns from nothing-the daily, the domestic, the little epiphanies. These poems are conversational, profound, narrative, and leavened with inimitable humor, often wry, often wistful. But these are also tough poems, thrumming with a quintessential helplessness that is so quintessentially human-what ultimately leads us to poetry to obtain "news that stays news," but to also restore our faith in the small things as the source of wholeness. You'll go back again and again to this wonderful book, and you'll tell others to get their hands on it. The poems become truer, more indispensable, with each reading. -Joseph Bathanti, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina

This Miraculous Turning

Dave McIntyre of the Washington Post said of the first edition of Angels, Thieves, and Winemakers: Wine Poems, "...a must-have for all wine lovers. No ideology here, just perspective. Mills has a keen sense for why wine is so improbably important to so many of us, and on page after page, the wine lover will say, 'Oh yes, that's me.'" This second edition features many of the poems from the first edition alongside new poems. This is indeed a must-have for every wine lover, and also every lover in general.

Angels, Thieves, and Winemakers (Second Edition)

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Beverages & Wine