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Y
The new book by Leslie Adrienne Miller, whose poems “are delightfully eclectic, learned and wise” (Ted Kooser)
If the face is a christening in flesh,
the boy of him is its opposite,
raising the tent of bones in which
he will harbor all the starry anomalies
that a knowledge of God cannot undo.
—from “Y”
Y is poet Leslie Adrienne Miller’s book of the looming child, the son, the cipher, the letter for which a math problem seeks a solution. Collaging lyric investigation, personal reflection, and hard research into psychology and childhood development, Miller describes motherhood with a broad-ranging intelligence, a fierce humor, and an elegant, emotive poetic line.
If the face is a christening in flesh,
the boy of him is its opposite,
raising the tent of bones in which
he will harbor all the starry anomalies
that a knowledge of God cannot undo.
—from “Y”
Y is poet Leslie Adrienne Miller’s book of the looming child, the son, the cipher, the letter for which a math problem seeks a solution. Collaging lyric investigation, personal reflection, and hard research into psychology and childhood development, Miller describes motherhood with a broad-ranging intelligence, a fierce humor, and an elegant, emotive poetic line.
- GenresPoetry
128 pages, Paperback
First published September 4, 2012
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95 people want to read
About the author
Leslie Adrienne Miller
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 10, 2014
I have long been a enamored by Leslie Adrienne Miller’s poetry and sophistication, her wisdom and knowledge of life. She’s bold when it comes to revealing the hidden secrets of her life. And does so with a revelation that is astonishing and astounding, drawing you into a language that makes you pause in wonder of her words and images. Compelling you to read on, turning each page in a fascination of questions, begging you to ask the next one, and wondering at how she will answer.
Archibald MacLeish, the 20th Century American poet once wrote; “We have learned all the answers, all the answers. It is the questions we do not know." And this is where “Y” leads the reader into asking the deepest questions, questions on how we are formed and shaped within a world where individuals are constantly presented with hidden possibilities and invisible pathways into our potential as fully developed human beings.
She writes with an amazing capacity, in using poetic language and images to capture the question of how we actualize this veiled potential. Wondering what comes next, wondering deeply what the next steps might be in our evolution and growth towards what we may become. The answer is here, hidden in the spaces between each word and verse.
Archibald MacLeish, the 20th Century American poet once wrote; “We have learned all the answers, all the answers. It is the questions we do not know." And this is where “Y” leads the reader into asking the deepest questions, questions on how we are formed and shaped within a world where individuals are constantly presented with hidden possibilities and invisible pathways into our potential as fully developed human beings.
She writes with an amazing capacity, in using poetic language and images to capture the question of how we actualize this veiled potential. Wondering what comes next, wondering deeply what the next steps might be in our evolution and growth towards what we may become. The answer is here, hidden in the spaces between each word and verse.
March 4, 2013
Leslie Adrienne Miller
Y: Poems
Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2012.
By Callista Buchen
"Y: Poems" was reviewed in The Literary Review
"Loss Control" Fall 2012
www.theliteraryreview.org
Leslie Adrienne Miller is fascinated with the male child’s evolving sense of right and wrong, as well as his linguistic and physical development and the factors that shape these processes. The riveting poems of her new collection, Y, explore that fascination, bringing together a variety of disciplines around child development— biological, social, cultural, and parental. In the second poem of the collection, “The Lucifer Effect,” we see the boy who appears throughout the collection interacting with a nearly blind neighbor who offers a treat through the fence: “Learning her limits is a game he suspects / he shouldn’t play, but sometimes he’s quiet / on pur- pose: some funny place in him likes / to see her struggle.”
Miller synthesizes research from a long list of sources that treat subjects as radically diverse as boy sopranos, language acquisition, feral children, testicular distention, genes, gender, and art. Miller also includes “adversaria” sections, each on its own page, where she includes short, research-based passages, typographically and functionally different from the poems. The adversaria on page 16 concludes: “They were surprised to find / massive palindromes, hairpin-like structures / that contain DNA sequences that read the same / backward and forward. Are we not drawn onward / to a new Era? The system is robust, / and it doesn’t depend on the weather.” Explained in “A Note on the Adversaria,” these moments “are almost all collaged direct quotes from sources listed at the back of the book and represent the poet’s attempt to leave a trail of bread crumbs from her forays into disciplines beyond her own in search of answers to questions the poems themselves collectively ask and only provisionally answer.” This strategy allows the poems and the adver- saria, each of which are strong and compelling as individual pieces, to resonate even further as an ongoing dialogue.
In addition to collaging research, Miller’s work deftly combines poetic strate- gies—the lyrical, narrative, reflective, and the new, in mostly traditional shapes— with precision and comprehensive intelligence. The resulting work is thoughtful, and visceral—readers will find both their minds and hearts engaged. Through the complex questions she articulates, Miller allows us to feel with the child and with his observer(s):
“All fodder, fur, and fury, / he’s bound to roll the sturdy carcass / of imperative against even this, / his glittering box of tokens for the heart.”
Perhaps the greatest success of the collection is the organic ease with which Miller couples the extent and scope of the research with insistent and emotional inquiry. She builds a new whole in splicing these veins, allowing the project to wrestle with the relationship of parent to child and child to parent. For instance, in “Relinquishing the Fusional Moment,” the speaker begins by identifying the chang- ing child: “The first sign is his rejection / of the French lullabies. The second, / a predilection for meat, / three, standing up to pee.” Later, the speaker acknowledges how these changes also propel a kind of relativity, forcing changes to the speaker’s sense of position: “I’m becoming another planet fast, / a hurtling ball of foreign gases.”
In poems like “Tuileries,” Miller implicates the reader in the child’s develop- ment, asking, of a scene of a child running at birds, “teeth bared with a brutal glee,” “How is our laughter at this good?” Miller is unafraid to indict the reader and the child, suggesting that an essential quality is unacknowledged:
What power there is, children claim like a sweet, a desire not grounded in need, but arriving nonetheless in their consciousness, an itch to rule even this make shift roost.
The speaker finds something of this experience in her adult self: All I know is: were you to appear
in the garden at this moment as threat to that boy body scooped from my own, I too would wear such a face, and I’d be aiming to kill.
Y wallops the reader with its quiet power, and of course it must, given that in read- ing the collection, “then we understand again that our minds / might not, after all, be our own to close.” Leslie Adrienne Miller’s investigation into development becomes an examination of the elusive slippage of relation and (seeming) opposi- tion, one where art and science, fear and longing, love and distance coalesce and “form a cradle that frees // and captures all at once.”
Y: Poems
Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2012.
By Callista Buchen
"Y: Poems" was reviewed in The Literary Review
"Loss Control" Fall 2012
www.theliteraryreview.org
Leslie Adrienne Miller is fascinated with the male child’s evolving sense of right and wrong, as well as his linguistic and physical development and the factors that shape these processes. The riveting poems of her new collection, Y, explore that fascination, bringing together a variety of disciplines around child development— biological, social, cultural, and parental. In the second poem of the collection, “The Lucifer Effect,” we see the boy who appears throughout the collection interacting with a nearly blind neighbor who offers a treat through the fence: “Learning her limits is a game he suspects / he shouldn’t play, but sometimes he’s quiet / on pur- pose: some funny place in him likes / to see her struggle.”
Miller synthesizes research from a long list of sources that treat subjects as radically diverse as boy sopranos, language acquisition, feral children, testicular distention, genes, gender, and art. Miller also includes “adversaria” sections, each on its own page, where she includes short, research-based passages, typographically and functionally different from the poems. The adversaria on page 16 concludes: “They were surprised to find / massive palindromes, hairpin-like structures / that contain DNA sequences that read the same / backward and forward. Are we not drawn onward / to a new Era? The system is robust, / and it doesn’t depend on the weather.” Explained in “A Note on the Adversaria,” these moments “are almost all collaged direct quotes from sources listed at the back of the book and represent the poet’s attempt to leave a trail of bread crumbs from her forays into disciplines beyond her own in search of answers to questions the poems themselves collectively ask and only provisionally answer.” This strategy allows the poems and the adver- saria, each of which are strong and compelling as individual pieces, to resonate even further as an ongoing dialogue.
In addition to collaging research, Miller’s work deftly combines poetic strate- gies—the lyrical, narrative, reflective, and the new, in mostly traditional shapes— with precision and comprehensive intelligence. The resulting work is thoughtful, and visceral—readers will find both their minds and hearts engaged. Through the complex questions she articulates, Miller allows us to feel with the child and with his observer(s):
“All fodder, fur, and fury, / he’s bound to roll the sturdy carcass / of imperative against even this, / his glittering box of tokens for the heart.”
Perhaps the greatest success of the collection is the organic ease with which Miller couples the extent and scope of the research with insistent and emotional inquiry. She builds a new whole in splicing these veins, allowing the project to wrestle with the relationship of parent to child and child to parent. For instance, in “Relinquishing the Fusional Moment,” the speaker begins by identifying the chang- ing child: “The first sign is his rejection / of the French lullabies. The second, / a predilection for meat, / three, standing up to pee.” Later, the speaker acknowledges how these changes also propel a kind of relativity, forcing changes to the speaker’s sense of position: “I’m becoming another planet fast, / a hurtling ball of foreign gases.”
In poems like “Tuileries,” Miller implicates the reader in the child’s develop- ment, asking, of a scene of a child running at birds, “teeth bared with a brutal glee,” “How is our laughter at this good?” Miller is unafraid to indict the reader and the child, suggesting that an essential quality is unacknowledged:
What power there is, children claim like a sweet, a desire not grounded in need, but arriving nonetheless in their consciousness, an itch to rule even this make shift roost.
The speaker finds something of this experience in her adult self: All I know is: were you to appear
in the garden at this moment as threat to that boy body scooped from my own, I too would wear such a face, and I’d be aiming to kill.
Y wallops the reader with its quiet power, and of course it must, given that in read- ing the collection, “then we understand again that our minds / might not, after all, be our own to close.” Leslie Adrienne Miller’s investigation into development becomes an examination of the elusive slippage of relation and (seeming) opposi- tion, one where art and science, fear and longing, love and distance coalesce and “form a cradle that frees // and captures all at once.”
March 1, 2013
Thank you to goodreads and Graywolf Press for choosing me as a First Reader. I enjoy poetry, but I have not written very much myself and am not trained as a critic. Although my sole child is a girl, I work with children on a daily basis and can see familiar reflections of "boyness", in addition to behaviors that aren't gender specific. The length of my reading experience before this review was due to the ease with which I could pick the book up, enjoy a poem, then reflect on it for days. Sometimes, I'd even just open the book at random spots to find if what I was reading resonated for that day. (And sometimes it did!) The only reason I couldn't give 5 stars, was the uneveness of the poems and the need for proof reading. (Can you prettyplease add half stars, goodreads?) Also, not sure if this is just me, but I'm not really keen on the cover...I hope I'm not offending the author, but it looks like the photo has been altered and I find the boy's eyes and posture disturbing...like he's been abused. (Maybe another reason I needed to partake of this book in doses? Or could just be my projection from the work I do, if others don't agree.) All said, this is a book I enjoyed and plan to share with others, so thanks again!
December 17, 2012
Thanks to Goodreads and the generous folks at Graywolf Press, I got a free uncorrected proof copy of Leslie Adrienne Miller's Y. It came out this September, so it's still fairly new, and at 15 USD not expensive for a poetry collection. As for the poems themselves -- I really enjoyed this book. I will have to go look at more of Miller's poetry.
These poems speak about the body, about our emotional and physical worlds; they are full of acute observations and interesting nuggets of information. Are we our bodies? Are we our minds? How can the two negotiate between each other, how are we human, when instinct causes us to physically react even when we don't want to? How honest can we be with ourselves about what we are? If this sounds abstract or philosophical, let me say that this book is very accessible, I just don't necessarily have the right words to explain just what it's doing. I can say, however, that I would not have minded paying 15 USD to get my copy of this book. It's good!
You can read a longer, more detailed review on my blog: http://thepoetryshelf.blogspot.com/20...
These poems speak about the body, about our emotional and physical worlds; they are full of acute observations and interesting nuggets of information. Are we our bodies? Are we our minds? How can the two negotiate between each other, how are we human, when instinct causes us to physically react even when we don't want to? How honest can we be with ourselves about what we are? If this sounds abstract or philosophical, let me say that this book is very accessible, I just don't necessarily have the right words to explain just what it's doing. I can say, however, that I would not have minded paying 15 USD to get my copy of this book. It's good!
You can read a longer, more detailed review on my blog: http://thepoetryshelf.blogspot.com/20...
December 13, 2016
In Y, many of Leslie Adrienne Miller's poems seem almost clinical—clear over my head—but always her skill brings clarity and realization. One page at a time you gain a sense that you will learn what you need to know. There's not a poem in this collection that won't make you pause after reading to assess your own understanding. And you come away better for each.
November 12, 2012
I am only on page 6 and already I have connected with one of her poems. "The Lucifer Effect" has it's title rightfully so. I believe a Mother can understand the thoughts behind that. I can see the little boy full of mischief and all boy.
October 27, 2012
I debated between giving this 3 or 4 stars. I have a uncorrected proof that I won. Maybe some editing might help. What is here is pretty amazing though. It is tough, unrelenting (although at times opaque)look at the other 49% of the population. How they've affected us historally, personally, and relationally. For the good and bad. And how we've affected them. Now just as adults, but as children, too. It's a lot of ground to cover. Don't expect this to be an easy read. If you have a good Humanites education you should be okay, but brush up on Roget.
October 30, 2012
I like my poetry to be erudite while maintaining a populist sensibility. Miller succeeds admirably at the former, not so much with the latter. Incorporating a deep study of psychology and childhood development into a series of poems is a tricky endeavor. When it works the results are surprising and razor sharp, when it stumbles it can come across as cold and distant, even in the most personal of poems.
My 3 star rating is entirely based on my personal enjoyment, there is no doubt in my mind that Miller is a 5 star talent.
My 3 star rating is entirely based on my personal enjoyment, there is no doubt in my mind that Miller is a 5 star talent.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews