Description
Book SynopsisA William Carlos William Award Finalist for 2012 A Kansas City Star Top Book of 2012 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.
Trade Review"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
