In Tongue Lyre, Tyler Mills weaves together fragments of myth and memory, summoning the works of Ovid, Homer, and James Joyce to spin a story of violence and the female body. Introducing the recurring lyre figure in the collection—a voice to counter the violence—is Ovid’s Philomena, who, while cruelly rendered speechless, nonetheless sets the reader on an eloquent voyage to discover the body through music, art, and language. Other legendary figures making appearances within—Telemachos, Nestor, Cyclops, Circe, and others—are held up as mirrors to reflect the human form as home. In this dynamic collection, the female body and its relationship to the psyche traverse mythic yet hauntingly familiar contemporary settings as each presents not a single narrative but a progressive exploration of our universal emotional experience.

Tongue Lyre (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry)

Literature & Fiction

Mills, Tyler

Poetry

Southern Illinois University Press

Death of the Blue Dogs: How the Demise of the Blue Dogs Harmed the Country & Created Q'Anon Voters: Explaining Where Our Politics Went Wrong

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

lulu.com

“…Mills proves that Faulkner underestimated a poet’s ability to manage enormous shifts of scale…Haunted by the unverified possibility of her fighter-pilot grandfather’s ‘involvement in the Nagasaki mission,’ Mills scans skies for contrails, scrutinizes negatives, reads survivors’ accounts, and sifts through white sands…Mills has written a book for the long nuclear century.” – Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
 Hawk Parable begins with a family mystery and engages with the limits of historical knowledge―particularly of the atomic bombs the U.S. dropped at the end of the Second World War and the repercussions of atomic tests the U.S. conducted throughout the 20th century. These poems explore a space between environmental crisis and a crisis of conscience. As a lyric collection, Hawk Parable begins as a meditation on the author's grandfather's possible involvement in the Nagasaki mission and moves through poems that engage with the legacy of nuclear testing on our global environment. At times, Hawk Parable borrows language from declassified nuclear test films, survivor accounts of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, scientific studies of bird migrations through the Nevada Test Site, and the author's grandfather's letters. This book enacts what it means to encounter fragments―of historical records, family stories, and survivor accounts―through exploring a variety of forms. Hawk Parable seeks what it means to be human in the spaces between tragedy and beauty, loss and life, in the relationships between the lyric speaker, history, and personal memory.

Hawk Parable: Poems (Akron Series in Poetry)

The University Of Akron Press

WINNER OF THE SNOWBOUND CHAPBOOK AWARD 
“In a tone reminiscent of the era’s radio plays, City Scattered offers a range of spliced voices that construct a multi-perspectival musing on ‘the new woman’ as she emerged in the labor and consumer culture of Germany between the wars… We participate in the city itself as it becomes a kaleidoscope of rapidly shifting images, making quick, expert cuts into each other, juxtaposing an arousing, energized youth, dancing, drinking, and punching time-clocks, with black-and-white, grainy newsreel imagery of unemployment lines and laundry drying in coal-polluted air. Tyler Mills keeps her language sharp and flat, vivid and yet frank…” 
―from the Snowbound Judge’s Citation by Cole Swensen

City Scattered: CABARET FOR FOUR VOICES

Literary

Tupelo Press

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Books by Mills, Tyler