Kirjahaku

The narrators in this mesmerizing collection often desire to hold time still -- in moments of love, yes, but also when feeling fully located in a particular place or experience. Yet they also acknowledge that to hold time still would mean the death of love, the death of experience. Thus, the grounding and locating sensory images that surround us -- and the eye that apprehends them -- become greatly important. At the heart of the book is "What Night Says to the Empty Boat," a sequence of lyric poems in which the three main characters -- Justine, Clarence, and Andy -- drift to and from, together and apart, viewed through the dispassionate lens of the unspoken fourth main character. An artistic and philosophical endeavor to place oneself in the world, this stunning collection is a wholehearted embrace of being, where technique and subject come together in a remarkable combination of personal lyric and formal innovation.

A 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.

The poems of this fourth collection from Wayne Miller exist in the wake of catastrophe, thrumming with pathos and humor, pain and the beauty of living. Post- coalesces around three primary occurrences: the birth of a child, the death of a father, and the seeming explosion of sociohistorical and political conflict and violence over the past fifteen years. Its world is one populated by rogue gunmen on shooting sprees, where the only inheritance a father has to pass on is his debt, where a car left in an airport parking lot and the coffee cup inside are more immediate presences of the dead. Young rioters leave chaos behind each evening, returning home to watch themselves on the evening news. The unzipping of snow from train tracks evokes the surgery of a family member. Lovers, drinking wine and rowing on a lake, find joy within and without a system that sees them only as consumers. Beginnings and endings, loss and rebirth, body and spirit: in Post-, Miller processes grief, but also cuts through pain, gorgeously and heartbreakingly, to open up a way forward. Winter permeates these poems--and yet spring is always beckoning in the next.

Winner of the 2022 Colorado Book Award for PoetryA boy asks his father what it means to die; a poet wonders whether we can truly know another’s thoughts; a man tries to understand how extreme violence and grace can occupy the same space. These are the questions Wayne Miller tackles in We the Jury: the hard ones, the impossible ones.From an academic dinner party disturbing in its crassness and disaffection to a family struggling to communicate gently the permanence of death, Miller situates his poems in dilemma. He faces moments of profound discomfort, grief, and even joy with a philosopher’s curiosity, a father’s compassion, and an overarching inquiry at the crossroads of ethics and art: what is the poet’s role in making sense of human behavior? A bomb crater–turned–lake “exploding with lilies,” a home lost during the late-aughts housing crash—these images and others, powerful and resonant, attempt to answer that question.Candid and vulnerable, Miller sits with us while we puzzle: we all wish we knew what to tell our children about death. But he also pushes past this and other uncertainties, vowing—and inviting us—to “expand our relationship / with Death,” and with every challenging, uncomfortable subject we meet. In the face of questions that seem impossible to answer, We the Jury offers not a shrug, but curiosity, transparency, a throwing of the arms wide.

"These poems achieve the beautiful, uncanny fusing that Miller defines as poetry itself.”—Rick Barot, author of Moving the BonesA tender and provocative collection of poems interrogating the troubles and wonders of both childhood and parenthood against the backdrop of global violence.From accomplished poet Wayne Miller comes a collection examining how an individual’s story both hews to and defies larger socio-political narratives and the sweep of history. A cubist making World War I camouflage, a forlorn panel on the ethics of violence in literature, an obsessive litany of “late capitalist” activities, a military drone pilot driving home after work—here, the awkward, the sweet, and the disturbing often merge. And underlying it all is Miller’s own domestic life with two children, who highlight the hopeful and ingenious aspects of childhood, which is “not // as I had thought / the thicket of light back at the entrance // but the wind still blowing / invisibly toward me / through it.”The End of Childhood, Miller’s sixth collection of poems, is his most intimate, juxtaposing his own fraught youth with that of his children amid insurrection and pandemic, vacation and vocation, art and war. This piercing book spares nothing as it searches for a measure of personal benevolence and truth in today’s turbulent, brutalizing world—which it confronts through a singularly candid and lyrical voice.

Sir Max The Reluctant Knight is an adventure story for 1st thru 5th graders about a ten year boy who lives in a castle with his parents, the King and Queen. His fun life of adventures playing in and around the castle with his friends suddenly become full of danger as his dad, King Robert, prepares his army to rescue his uncle in his castle down the road. Nothing could be more exciting and more scary than watching the hundreds of knights battle over their Kingdoms. But just as King Robert rode his huge black horse into the fight, he was knocked to the ground and was attacked. Max was frozen in fear-could he get the courage to save his dad and save the Kingdom?

Negotiated Peace is a behavior modification system designed to help people who are struggling with issues around body weight establish permanent, healthy weight management behaviors. Whether you are currently overweight or not, doesn't matter. If you are caught up in a seemingly eternal war over weight, this book is for you. After reading this book and performing the assignments and exercises outlined, you will become victorious in the war over weight and be able to settle the war permanently with a negotiated peace. In contrast to any other weight-loss book or health promotional, Negotiated Peace teaches you how to change your behaviors permanently. In other words, other programs may teach you how to behave differently, but they do not teach you how to change your behavior. Everyone can be victorious in the war over weight, but it won't happen unless you go beyond the realm of learning how to behave and into the realm of learning how to change behavior. Negotiated Peace will bring you there.

Poetry. "Wayne Miller's ONLY THE SENSES SLEEP celbrates the transforming power of attentino and distraction, as the perceived dissolves into memory and reverie. 'Moving away from myself//and further into myself' in a poetry both elegant and completely natural, 'the mind keeps trying to arrive/at the other side of here, ' leaving it refreshed and exhilirated by the knowledge that 'retreat//is also a kind of arrival.'"--John Koethe. Wayne Miller was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, studied at Oberlin College, and after working briefly in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, received an MFA from the University of Houston

Camp Clean Water is a fun adventure story about six grade school students who have entered their school's science fair with exhibits on keeping our water environment clean. These students are from communities near beaches, swamps, rivers, and the Gulf of Mexico. Helping these communities respect these bodies of water and keep them free of pollution and litter are the major goals the students are showing in their science projects. Winning their school science fair earns them a week at the Camp Clean Water where biologists and water experts will enrich their knowledge of the affects of pollution on water.