Post- ― Poems

The poems of this fourth collection from Wayne Miller exist in the wake of catastrophe. It is a world populated by rogue gunmen on shooting sprees, a world where the only inheritance a father has to pass on is his debt. In this world, every box could be a bomb and what comes after is what is lived. And yet, this painful past is not set in stone. The past becomes the present, yielding toward an immediate future.

The collection coalesces around a series of post-elegies” written after the death of the poet’s father. Each examines loss from a new angle. In one, he drives around for four years with his father’s ashes in the trunk of his cara perfect American burial”until he brings the box to the ocean where he tumped the dust / at the lip of the waves and they swallowed it up. / It was as easy as that.” In another, the image of a blazing house in the middle of a hard freeze appears, leaving Miller to decide if his father is the house or the fire filling the house / with motion, your light opening / the rooms from the dark.” Throughout this series, Miller processes grief, but also cuts through pain to open up a way forward in the aftermath of shared loss.

Wayne Miller elegantly disassembles the world around him, finding in it fresh, new meaning.Post- thrums with pathos and humor, pain and the beauty of living.

Wayne Miller is the author of three previous collections of poems: The City, Our City (Milkweed, 2011), The Book of Props (Milkweed, 2009), andOnly the Senses Sleep (New Issues, 2006). He’s also the translator of two books from the Albanian poet Moikom Zeqo, and the co-editor of three books includingNew European Poets (Graywolf, 2008) with Kevin Prufer and the forthcoming Literary Publishing in the 21st Century (Milkweed, 2016) with Travis Kurowski and Kevin Prufer. The recipient of a Bess Hokin Prize, a George Bogin Award, and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from Poetry, as well as a finalist for a William Carlos Williams Award and a Rilke Prize, Miller teaches at the University of Colorado Denver, where he editsCopper Nickel.