Impossible Things

by Miller Oberman

Offering an intimate account of intergenerational grief, Miller Oberman’s new collection of poetry, Impossible Things, explores his experiences as both a transgender child and father. Oberman weaves in passages from his own deceased father’s unpublished memoir to engage with the mysterious drowning of his eldest brother, Joshua, at age two, a tragedy that cast a shadow over his childhood. He depicts his own youth and parenthood in the context of his father’s trauma, employing queer and trans theory and experimental poetic forms to challenge and expand discourse around fatherhood and masculinity. Oberman moves beyond an attempt to solve the mystery of Joshua’s death and interrogates how much we can ever know about our forebears or understand their impacts on our lives. Impossible Things offers a necessary intervention into the well-worn terrain of fatherhood/boyhood memoir and functions as a living elegy, communicating with the past, the dead, and the unknowable while speaking to the possibilities for healing intergenerational trauma.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Hardcover

Published October 22, 2024

Reviews

[Maggie Dunleavy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A real banger. The kind of grief shit we all need, or will need someday. Not every poem hit perfectly for me, but on the whole it’s a beautiful book I will definitely come back to for a bunch of reasons (and any book that’s lighting up transness, parenthood, AND grief … that’s gonna be doing it for me)

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have to caveat this review with the statement that I know Miller, and in fact, went to school with him in an MFA program, so that is full disclosure that I am not an entirely objective reviewer. Miller digs deep into his childhood and his deceased father, and I remember discussing the ambivalence Miller had about his father's sufism when we were in graduate school together. This is far more deeply and consistently personal that Miller's first collection which explores Miller's love of anglo-saxon version as well as transgendered and queer identity. Yet this is also some of Miller's most vivid and beautiful writing.

Do yourself a favor and if you are a fan of poetry, read this elegiac collection.