August Zero

Jane Miller

In Jane Miller’s fourth collection of poems, August Zero, she often interrupts narrative impulses with jarring juxtapositions and metaphors, associative and dissociative reflections, myth and dream, creating an intensely lyrical language that defies paraphrase. Against an end-of-the-century scenario filled with threats of population explosion and environmental disaster, Miller describes a post-apocalyptic resurrection of consciousness. Judges honoring the book with a Western States Book Award wrote, “With skillful, irrepressible imagination, Jane Miller has written an intelligent, imaginative and evocative book about love. True in both thought and description, August Zero carries the author’s sustained vision and intelligence from beginning to end.”

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ISBN: 9781556590610

Format: Paperback

ISBN: 9781556590603

Format: Hardcover

Caliente

Dreams never stop, I simply rise
and shower and cook breakfast in the light
of the flares. Then I go forward, the liquid
teeming with hatching fish. We’re lying comfortably
on our backs, how we best get along,
yet when I wake I’m all alone.
It never fails
we find the single most beautiful
tree laden with ornamental fruit.
A poetic obsession, nothing
to return to the world,
were we going there. As it happens
we name the world with a word in mind,
and then locate the thing in the leaves.
It is some remote horizon we move closer.
This hard work is love and it’s funny
to be back. It’s like I’m not here,
but with all the porches and pigs in pickups,
the stink of it and the roar which are fake
fit under the sun and feel ok.
Endless search through earthy shades,
orange tones, octagonal street designs,
freeways of apparently black construction trucks,
mad beeping in the high-tones of the jungle,
and the airport that cages our dreams
hangs dimly in memory,
who turns into a child.

About the Author

Jane Miller has written twelve books, most recently Who Is Trixie the Trasher? and Other Questions, and including Working Time: Essays on Poetry, Culture, and Travel. She has performed her creative work and lectured on literature and the fine arts at universities, colleges, libraries, community centers, and public arts venues for over thirty years. She is the recipient of a Wallace Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Western States Book Award, and the Audre …

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Reviews

“These poems frequently attain a heightened language rare in contemporary poetry. Miller is frankly romantic, visionary, and political.” —Harvard Review

“Jane Miller is by far one of our best poets writing today… Miller is like the NASA space station of poetry: out of this world, yet of it, and still looking down. From her peculiar and important vantage she blows us kisses in the form of images that hit their mark.” —Lambda Book Report