Kingdom

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 bes...