We Can't Ever Do This Again

by Amber McMillan

A blind boy comforts himself with a telephone’s dial tone and later becomes an international prankster. The discovery of a fox crucified in a toolshed prefigures the breakdown of a close relationship. McMillan’s poems render both the public and the intimate with uncanny precision. They show us how these two worlds influence and invade one another. The flux and flicker of private memories are captured and projected brightly onto a shared, communal space. This is an adroit poetry that moves beyond confession; rather, it first stands witness, and then records, and then transmits its experiences to us like a gift.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 2015

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Delta · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed these poems. They are not your "typical" poems about love and nostalgia, and they don't rhyme. Nonetheless, they are lovely to read and thought provoking.

**I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.**

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imagine we ran ourselves right off the road.
It's a bit easy, but it might be very near the truth:
during those times - especially those times -
that you thought you had been winning all along,
imagine you weren't even close.

Imagine we could be luminously sane
and dragooned by only a few minutes to go,
pull off an apology for everything.
A doctrine of explanations. Propositions at best.
Imagine this as a punishment from me to you.

- The Dramatist and His Dialogue with the Devil, pg. 16

* * *

Open your eyes and face me. Draw
your free hands from your pockets
and turn your pirate jaw down more.
Sink every penny on the long shot
and quit staring, it's psychopathic.
Unfasten these high horses and give
up the paper route. Of that I'm sure.
Rake up those newsprint, science-fair
remodels and built them higher.
Thing about the kids and stop bitching
so loudly, so longly, into half-hung
closet doors between adjoining rooms.
Talk better. Say more things and be
easier on people. I'm not mad.

- Sonnet XVI, pg. 30

* * *

Knowing that nothing is free, I recognize early
my shifting physiology, the changes in atmosphere.
Familiarity slid in, so much thinner and higher
in the veins than blood, and I knew again
the toll for things that have been, for those to come.

But I know now how to carry the weight of you,
how to level it evenly across both shoulders,
let it castigate all tenderness, let it sink and settle.
I know now how to bear your beauty too;
bitterly and unfreely, but I do.

- It Was Nice To See You Again, pg. 45

* * *

This is the shabby garden of brimful sensibility,
of copious anonymity and of ravenous reactivity.
I am surveyor of bird and briar, of bloom taxonomy,
descendant of thorough and uncertain emblemology.

Here, jungle brush is as good a starting place as any
to all erogenies, to earthly terms, to bawdy philosophies.
I am encounterer and recorder of civic natural order,
employer and mourner of every private corner.

- Sun Dog Community Garden, pg. 63

[Laura Nicol · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sexy, dark, heart-stoppingly beautiful poems.