Wilderness Lessons

by J.M. Miller

Wilderness Lessons by JM Miller is a love note to the planet that risks burning, a song of loss and connection, and a prayer for being alive and becoming “the animal you were meant to be.” An Eco-poetry book of personal and political honesty, of the violence and elegy of living, this debut collection considers the dissolution of human separateness as a way to create a new space for identity that is fluid—tracing the upwell of violence against people on the fringes of binary constructions and violence against animals and the planet. “Pronoun says the planet is burning,” the poet writes of sun rays and our beating hearts. Written by a poet of tremendous energy, ecstatic imagery, and deeply inherited wisdom, these poems conjure a new understanding of the American poem from JM’s trans-gender, trans-being, howling throat pointed at a sky still brimming with stars.

Genres: Poetry

82 pages, Paperback

First published August 2, 2016

Reviews

[Emily Kestrel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Miller shows a beautiful and inventive use of language in these poems. Unfortunately I didn’t care for most of the poems as a whole, but the collection is definitely unusual and worth a read.

[FutureCycle Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

We are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:


PAPER SPARROWS (AT THE MUSEUM)

a slip of paper no larger than a dollar
records the scale of value for a slave.

Rows of age & rows of worth, the black
body’s gains & losses over time.

You see the paper is degrading, yellowing
tree fibers from an oily thumb nearly enough

to erase the pencil’s mark.

At the next exhibit white poets
read paper sparrows to sleep—

a stiff wind in their feathers—still
love in their curated bodies of paper.

They lean in until a black fly in the bird’s eye
tires, eating away the carrion into sight,

& they see suddenly a boy,
his invisible hands raised, opening his heart

to a country refusing to remember him.
Some keep the dead alongside them,

feathers in the cap, the bittersweet blues
of fairy tales, while others open & close

the birds’ beaks to hear
the price of a spirit, the labor of a body,

a hundred dollars for each year of life,
the value of a dead boy in the street.


PLUCKED

for Aung San Suu Kyi

Behind the turkey a heavy-beaked crane
hovers. Faint sound of an alarm

bleep-bleeps a smoke signal
lost in the dense air above water.

The turkey stands peg-legged in an island
of long grass, boastful red wattle swinging

its nervous pendulum. It is a fugitive
without hands to raise: I give up.

I hope it bites. That, if it had to, would maul my arm
until it was a piece of itself. We keep our distance,

exchanging a long look, the silence
before peace or riot.

Just yesterday the turkey was pulled on a string
by four neighborhood kids in denim coats.

They marched the turkey across the road, stood
in a circle, tossed the turkey like a sack.

Because I have sometimes been her, because
I am of her, I begged the stupid bird

to fly, just fly
as it struggled in their arms, keeping its mouth shut.

This is what it means to be submerged in dirty water—
forty fingers around your throat.

[Erika · Rating 1 out of 5]

These are not poems, but rather a random collection of unrelated sentences that just so happen to be held captive on the same page.

There's no rythm, no flow & no discernable pace to ANY of them. It was as if the author was standing in a crowded room (where everyone was speaking at once), plucking sentences sentences from the air & writing them down.

The wilderness lesson? Don't go hiking with this author--you'll go crazy or die. If there's any mercy in the world, the latter.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book a lot. I wouldn't categorize it as nature poetry, but those who like nature will like it, and those who don't like nature but like poetry will also like it.