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This Miraculous Turning
This Miraculous Turning is a book that turns from nothing-the daily, the domestic, the little epiphanies. These poems are conversational, profound, narrative, and leavened with inimitable humor, often wry, often wistful. But these are also tough poems, thrumming with a quintessential helplessness that is so quintessentially human-what ultimately leads us to poetry to obtain "news that stays news," but to also restore our faith in the small things as the source of wholeness. You'll go back again and again to this wonderful book, and you'll tell others to get their hands on it. The poems become truer, more indispensable, with each reading. -Joseph Bathanti, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina
- GenresPoetry
74 pages, Paperback
First published September 15, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 8, 2021
I first encountered Joseph Mills on YouTube, reading at Poetry Hickory. I was so impressed that I ordered Exit, Pursued by a Bear . I loved that book enough to give it five stars (2016), so I don’t know why I let this volume sit on my Wish List for so long. I urge other poetry fans to grab it now.
Mills writes the type of poetry I love most: almost conversational, but using a poet’s skill
for what to say and leave out. It’s writing that sticks with you because it is, in turns, touching, humorous, or heart-wrenching – often all those things at once, as happens when a parent speaks of his hopes and worries about a child. The theme of turning or changing echoes the title throughout. Most of the change is about time: how quickly children grow up and how slowly civilization evolves. Mills is a White academic, married to a European, I’m guessing French since they call her “Maman.” He adopts two Black children and lives in North Carolina, where the comments and his fears about racism are multiplied. The children are young and don’t yet understand how frightening this is, but it keeps Mills awake at night. Touring Civil War sites as a white New Englander with a European wife and two Southern Black kids adds many layers of depth to those poems.
Here are a few moments that especially grabbed me. In “Swimming Lessons,” Mills says he and his wife are swimmers from swimming families, but can’t get their adoptive daughter to put her head underwater for them. They enroll her in a class with a stranger (is her name really Mrs. White?), who soon has her swimming laps.
“I watch and wonder what I could have learned
from my parents had they not been my parents.”
“The Color Wheel” deals with a realization of life’s unfairness that must come to all Black children in our country.
“My daughter says, ‘Daddy, Brandon called me black,
and when I said I was milk chocolate, he said, ‘No,
you’re black….
To say she’s black when she’s actually cocoa brown
makes no sense. It’s oddly crude like something
a baby would do. And my skin looks nothing like
the paper in our printer or the kitchen appliances….”
“The Next Door Neighbor” begins with a nasty start, when Mills and his wife, before children, discover, as they move in, that their next door neighbor is a racist. Then we have one of those turnings that proves what many of us believe, that racism is based on ignorance and lack of experience with those we claim to hate.
“And one day we realize our daughter
is gone. She’s not in the house or yard
and we find her on the neighbor’s porch,
chatting away. She’s good company ,
the woman says, and, from then on,
each time our child goes outside,
the woman yells from her chair,
Here comes Miss America! "
Mills writes the type of poetry I love most: almost conversational, but using a poet’s skill
for what to say and leave out. It’s writing that sticks with you because it is, in turns, touching, humorous, or heart-wrenching – often all those things at once, as happens when a parent speaks of his hopes and worries about a child. The theme of turning or changing echoes the title throughout. Most of the change is about time: how quickly children grow up and how slowly civilization evolves. Mills is a White academic, married to a European, I’m guessing French since they call her “Maman.” He adopts two Black children and lives in North Carolina, where the comments and his fears about racism are multiplied. The children are young and don’t yet understand how frightening this is, but it keeps Mills awake at night. Touring Civil War sites as a white New Englander with a European wife and two Southern Black kids adds many layers of depth to those poems.
Here are a few moments that especially grabbed me. In “Swimming Lessons,” Mills says he and his wife are swimmers from swimming families, but can’t get their adoptive daughter to put her head underwater for them. They enroll her in a class with a stranger (is her name really Mrs. White?), who soon has her swimming laps.
“I watch and wonder what I could have learned
from my parents had they not been my parents.”
“The Color Wheel” deals with a realization of life’s unfairness that must come to all Black children in our country.
“My daughter says, ‘Daddy, Brandon called me black,
and when I said I was milk chocolate, he said, ‘No,
you’re black….
To say she’s black when she’s actually cocoa brown
makes no sense. It’s oddly crude like something
a baby would do. And my skin looks nothing like
the paper in our printer or the kitchen appliances….”
“The Next Door Neighbor” begins with a nasty start, when Mills and his wife, before children, discover, as they move in, that their next door neighbor is a racist. Then we have one of those turnings that proves what many of us believe, that racism is based on ignorance and lack of experience with those we claim to hate.
“And one day we realize our daughter
is gone. She’s not in the house or yard
and we find her on the neighbor’s porch,
chatting away. She’s good company ,
the woman says, and, from then on,
each time our child goes outside,
the woman yells from her chair,
Here comes Miss America! "
October 22, 2017
Lots of poems about parenting in here, which is probably a large part of the reason I loved it. But it's a solid collection overall. Mills is wonderful at taking the small moments and opening them wide, and I found myself in tears on more than one occasion.
July 5, 2021
Joseph Mills is a great poet and a friend of mine, so full disclosure.
I've read a bunch of his books, and I intend this summer to go back and re-read and write a review for every one I have--at last count six.
Joe is the master of making a mountain out of the minuscule, and that is a most excellent talent. As I recall, Emerson is the one who said, "Wisdom is seeing the miraculous in the common." And I could not agree more. And I cannot emphasize enough that Joe takes moments others might find unremarkable, then makes them remarkable, and then makes the moments glow from within until readers see a meaning unexpected and life-changing.
Joe and his wife are adoptive parents, and their skins and the skins of their children are different shades. As a result, some of these poems rip open the easy myths about race and humanity that far too many are comfortable perpetuating. In "Dixie," Joe asks the question at the root of all American problems: "How long does it take to be from around here?" How do we come to be recognized as belonging wherever we are, and how deep do those roots go? The answer in the poem is sobering and maddening but painfully accurate.
In one of my favorites, "My Daughter Continues to Be Annoyed by George Washington," the view of America is expanded to include his daughter's illuminating take on a slave-owner who was also a president. Better yet, the lines reveal the awful entanglement of all of us in the complicities and tragedies of history that his daughter faces in accepting from her father an allowance that features the portrait of the first US President. My favorite aspect of the poem is that even enmeshed as she and Joe and I and you are in the web of history, still she persists in asking the questions that shed light where light is due.
In another favorite, "Questions," as they drive along one day, Joe's daughter addresses the existential questions, as most of us do, when she is very young. And, of course, the honest answers to what was here before everything was here and where do we go when we die are her father's "I don't know." Since none of us get any answers we want to those questions, I commend the wisdom of Joe's daughter: "She looks out the side, and I look forward,/ then she asks if we can have some music." Here is wisdom.
Of course, the entire book is good, worthy of your attention and dollars (even if said dollars display George Washington). If you are ready to have your heart wrenched open to the sun, take a look.
I've read a bunch of his books, and I intend this summer to go back and re-read and write a review for every one I have--at last count six.
Joe is the master of making a mountain out of the minuscule, and that is a most excellent talent. As I recall, Emerson is the one who said, "Wisdom is seeing the miraculous in the common." And I could not agree more. And I cannot emphasize enough that Joe takes moments others might find unremarkable, then makes them remarkable, and then makes the moments glow from within until readers see a meaning unexpected and life-changing.
Joe and his wife are adoptive parents, and their skins and the skins of their children are different shades. As a result, some of these poems rip open the easy myths about race and humanity that far too many are comfortable perpetuating. In "Dixie," Joe asks the question at the root of all American problems: "How long does it take to be from around here?" How do we come to be recognized as belonging wherever we are, and how deep do those roots go? The answer in the poem is sobering and maddening but painfully accurate.
In one of my favorites, "My Daughter Continues to Be Annoyed by George Washington," the view of America is expanded to include his daughter's illuminating take on a slave-owner who was also a president. Better yet, the lines reveal the awful entanglement of all of us in the complicities and tragedies of history that his daughter faces in accepting from her father an allowance that features the portrait of the first US President. My favorite aspect of the poem is that even enmeshed as she and Joe and I and you are in the web of history, still she persists in asking the questions that shed light where light is due.
In another favorite, "Questions," as they drive along one day, Joe's daughter addresses the existential questions, as most of us do, when she is very young. And, of course, the honest answers to what was here before everything was here and where do we go when we die are her father's "I don't know." Since none of us get any answers we want to those questions, I commend the wisdom of Joe's daughter: "She looks out the side, and I look forward,/ then she asks if we can have some music." Here is wisdom.
Of course, the entire book is good, worthy of your attention and dollars (even if said dollars display George Washington). If you are ready to have your heart wrenched open to the sun, take a look.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews