BOOKS
Tender the River
Shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Provocateur Award
Finalist for the Jacar Press Julie Suk Award
Runner Up for Poetry by the Sea Book Award
Finalist for the New Hampshire Poetry Society Book Award
Tender the River captures in verse the history and legacy of the Merrimack River Valley, from the Pennacook, Wamesit, Algonquin, and other indigenous tribes who settled there first, to the European settlers who came with guns and their god to supplant them, to being the birthplace of America’s industrial revolution and first labor movements, to becoming a center of continued immigration, of entrenched nativism, and even multicultural celebration. The Merrimack River begins with the confluence of the Pemigewasset and Winnipesaukee rivers spilling from the White Mountains in New Hampshire, then travels down through mill towns like Manchester, Lowell, and Haverhill to finally spit out violently into the Atlantic in the old port (now posh) town of Newburyport. In its journey between those points and as well across the centuries, the Merrimack River Valley has been America in microcosm, many of the nation’s democratic successes and demagogic sins being seeded there.
“Damn, this book is good. Matt Miller’s writing brings to mind Richard Sennett’s treatise on the joys and value of making, The Craftsman, wherein he celebrates discipline, commitment, and the time it takes to produce quality work. It also evokes Donald Hall’s famous essay, ‘Poetry and Ambition,’ in which he laments the lack of such seriousness among contemporary poets and the advent of what he calls the ‘McPoem’—cobbled quickly, shabbily, and with very little ambition toward memorability. I believe that both Sennett and Hall would agree with me that Matt Miller is a craftsman of the first order. And his most recent collection, Tender the River, is well-wrought, exquisite, and built to last. Beautiful as a bespoke three-piece, useful as a pair of hand-crafted brogues.”
—John Murillo, author of Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry
“The poet presents the complexities of a lived place, a loved place, as if they were an extension of himself. Blurred is the line between the poet and the town-river-city-home. The intimacy of his prose lives in the clarity memory, and tempting to believe those memories, they become our own. This brilliant work is a kind of tectonic love, attempting to get at the soul of a place, even when that place seems almost soulless.”
—The Eric Hoffer Award
The Wounded for the Water
Miller explores the littoral zone; between the firmament of experience and understanding, between first breath and death, where strict definitions of gender, fatherhood, and masculinity swirl in the pull of tides and the curl and crush of waves. In these lyrical meditations, we are witness to our own drowning in family and history, in politics and love. We are dragged across reefs and pounded into the shore, realizing ultimately that the only way to avoid drowning is to embrace the maelstrom and breathe in the water.
“Matt W. Miller’s The Wounded for the Water is a horrific, undulating, beautiful, sublime lesson on the art of drowning, the wonder of living, and the scars that act as memory. You will have no choice but to dive into this meditation, and you will have no choice but to go deep. Miller's portrait of masculinity is a lyrical homage to the survived and resilient, to the learned and unlearned, a prayer for the departed. Like so many hurricanes, Miller teaches us that sometimes you’re left with nothing, and that is the moment when you can choose to be reborn or continue holding your breath.”
—Willie Perdomo, author The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award
“The reality of drowning, and the powerful metaphor of it, inform Matt Miller’s lyrical muscular new collection. Although water, violent or not, is often the book’s setting, these relentless poems explore the pain and perils of tenderness , of friendship, our physical and moral vulnerability, the challenges of loving and being loved. As Miller puts himself at risk again and again, his poetry grabs me by the throat, breaks my heart, even makes me laugh—and, oddly, gives me hope.”
—Gail Mazur, author of Forbidden City
Club Icarus
Winner 2012 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry
With muscular language and visceral imagery, Club Icarus bears witness to the pain, the fear, and the flimsy mortality that births our humanity as well as the hope, humor, love, and joy that completes it. This book will appeal to sons and fathers, to parents and children, to those tired of poetry that makes no sense, to those who think lyric poetry is dead, to those who think the narrative poem is stale, to those who think that poetry has sealed itself off from the living world, and to those who appreciate the vernacular as the language of living and the act of living as something worth putting into language.
“A down-to-earth intelligence and an acute alertness to the gritty movement of language are what you’ll treasure most in Matt Miller’s Club Icarus. If you love sentences that fiercely sing the full measure of human tides—from joy to grief—you just might pass this book on to a friend or relative who needs it, or even better yet, purchase their own copy.”
—Major Jackson, author of Holding Company and judge of the Vassar Miller Prize
Cameo Diner
“The work of Matt Miller is full of this thing called conscience…. Matt writes… ‘into the silence of mortality’—into the mystery of what it is to be human, with our annihilation always a possibility, with our determination always plucking us up from despair. How is it that human beings survive, the poet seems to ask, with so much madness about, so much danger—so much impulse on the part of the powerful to use the next human being as part of an agenda?”
—Joe Hurka, Author of the Pushcart-Prize-Winning Memoir Fields of Light
“This is a powerful first book.... grounded in urban imagery, peopled by vibrant characters and written by a poet with a keen eye for detail. Importantly, the poet also paid close attention to the aural aspects of his words and phrasings. It's a well-rounded grouping of poems that reveal Miller's talent for form and imagery. Get it, you won't regret it.”
—David O. Robinson