Perforated

by Chloe Yelena Miller

Chloe Yelena Miller's Perforated offers us intimate, confiding poems that ask us to lean closer. "Can you keep a secret?" the poems say. This is a book of lost friendships and lost loves, the world an "Ever rotating exhibit of light and dark," the regrets we have decades later over "what can go wrong / without the right words." Throughout, the speaker-always a mother who fears the future-worries about English vocabulary and newly learned Italian phrases, as if learning language might teach us to mourn more easily this difficult present or help us to find, at last, a place we might call home.

- Jehanne Dubrow,

author of Civilians

63 pages, Paperback

Published January 21, 2026

About the author

Chloe Yelena Miller is a writer and teacher living in Washington, D.C., with her partner and child. She’s the author of Perforated (2026) and Viable (2021), both published by Lily Poetry Review Books, and also the poetry chapbook Unrest (Finishing Line Press, 2013). She co-founded and co-directs Brown Bag Lit, an online writing community. Miller teaches writing and literature through University of Maryland’s Global Campus, Politics and Prose bookstore and New Directions in Writing. Miller has a BA in Italian language and literature from Smith College (1998) and an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College (2003).

Reviews

[Dee S · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each of these poems will touch you in a different way. Poems of loss, friendship, family, memories and the world today are beautifully written.
My favorites-
English vocabulary :Lentils
New York City (1)
Stars
Disarm