The City, Our City: Poems

by Wayne Miller

Overview

“[A] wide-ranging, fascinating series of poems that [has] the city as character at its center, the city as a collective soul, the city as idea.” —Sycamore Review

A William Carlos Williams Award Finalist

A Kansas City Star Top Book of the Year

A Library Journal Top Winter Poetry Pick

A series of semi-mythologized, symbolic narratives interspersed with dramatic monologues, the poems collected in The City, Our City showcase the voice of a young poet striking out, dramatically, emphatically, to stake his claim on “the City.” It is an unnamed, crowded place where the human questions and observations found in almost any city—past, present, and future—ring out with urgency. These poems—in turn elegiac, celebratory, haunting, grave, and joyful—give hum to our modern experience, to those caught up in the City’s immensity, and announce the arrival of a major new contemporary poet.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571318305
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	10/05/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	130
File size:	496 KB

About the Author

Wayne Miller is the author of two previous collections of poems, The Book of Props (Milkweed, 2009) and Only the Senses Sleep (New Issues, 2006), which received the William Rockhill Nelson Award. He is also the translator of Moikom Zeqo’s I Don’t Believe in Ghosts (BOA Editions, 2007) and an editor (with Kevin Prufer and 22 regional editors) of New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008). The recipient of the George Bogin Award, the Lucille Medwick Award (in 2004, 2005, 2007, and 2009), and the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America, as well as a Ruth Lilly Fellowship and the Bess Hokin Prize from the Poetry Foundation, Miller lives in Kansas City and teaches as the University of Central Missouri, where he edits Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.

Editorial Reviews

The city where Miller’s third book takes place is decidedly modern: it has movie theaters and “I-beams,” airplanes and streetlights—“the City is a bloom/ of light in the nation’s night-/ black veil.” At the same time it is vexed by some ancient concerns: it is, perhaps has long been, a city at war, with a “Royal Cathedral” and a history that requires a preindustrial brand of English (“Mister Preacher// marke the doores with crosses”). The collection takes its unity from 14 poems with Roman numerals instead of titles, each of them “endlessly musing// the backstreets and boulevards” in order to make of the city a streamlined sketch or model for contemporary American life. Poem X remembers when “Tanks ripped away cornerstones// in the Gothic District, cinemas/ showed footage of whatever// was happening outside.” It is a post-9/11, post-imperial, unjust city, one that tries to get past persistent fears, to find a space for private life, while “sirens choke back their warnings,” and silence “curls inside the shell that refused to explode.” Miller (The Book of Props), also the co-editor of the widely read literary journal Pleiades, also mixes in poems—such as “American Aubade”—which do not use the backdrop of his city at all; some of them are his best work, acquiring (in place of historical sweep) a quirky, small-scale wisdom at which Miller excels: “folks keep lying down/ inside their parents’ fears—// and what of it? This is/ what they want.” (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Wayne Miller [is] among the best poets in the USA at the moment [. . .] The City, Our City is through-composed, coherent in the unity of its parts, and terribly moving.” — Notre Dame Review

“Miller’s combination of allegory, stark imagism, surrealist panache, and sophisticated tonal movement create a poem that is as dynamic as the architectural space of his city.” —Micah Bateman, Kenyon Review Online

“However grimly real, some of these poems are also truly beautiful [. . .] The City, Our City [reminds] us that poets still know its their job to think big and to find all sorts of ways to make their poems big as well.” —Herman Asarnow, The Cincinnati Review

“[A] wide-ranging, fascinating series of poems that [. . . has] the city as character at its center, the city as a collective soul, the city as idea.” —David Blomenberg, Sycamore Review

“The urban spaces explored in Miller’s third collection (after The Book of Props) are less evocative of Whitman’s tumultuous Mannahatta than of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Unreal City’ [. . .] Like Eliot, Miller reveals a flair for haunting imagery [. . .] but it is the metaphysics of silent despair that he captures most effectively[.] [Miller’s] attempts to link the symbolic significance of cities with the deep human needs that made them inevitable are often riveting.” —Fred Muratori, Library Journal

“The muse of this exquisite collection is an imagined contemporary metropolis [. . .] that thrives simultaneously with the lost cities it has risen from and falls toward, allowing the poet’s urbanites to grasp the continuity of human tragedy and joy.” — The Kansas City Star

From the Publisher

The urban spaces explored in Miller's third collection (after The Book of Props) are less evocative of Whitman's tumultuous Mannahatta than of T.S. Eliot's "Unreal City," peopled not by rushing pedestrians and aggressive cabbies but by shadows, ghostly memories, and the poet's own brooding consciousness. Miller's unnamed city seems born of dreams but not aspirations; it has a past but not a recorded history. Everywhere there is the sense of time irretrievably lost ("Porchlights/ coming on, the theater/ boarded and sealed shut/ with the posters of exhausted shows"), perhaps for the better. Like Eliot, Miller reveals a flair for haunting imagery, noting the "panoramic dark of a rail car" or the "neoned, crisscrossing,/ paperflecked streets," but it is the metaphysics of silent despair that he captures most effectively: "The houses one by one abandoning, each as if a wave has rushed inside./ Withdrawing, it leaves a trail of possessions in the yard." VERDICT Miller's meditative approach to his subject may seem sedate, almost ethereal, but his attempts to link the symbolic significance of cities with the deep human needs that made them inevitable are often riveting.—Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

Library Journal