The City, Our City

(Paperback)

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FINALIST FOR THE WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS AWARD

A breakout collection that showcases the voice of a young poet striking out, dramatically, emphatically, to stake his claim on the Cityan unnamed, crowded place filled with gunmen, lovers, children, neighbors, builders, soldiers, professors, bouncers, and widowers.

In this series of semi-mythologized, symbolic narratives interspersed with dramatic monologues, Wayne Miller presents a city laden with kisses in doorways, weapons / and sculptures, concerts / and fistfights, sex toys and votives, / engines and metaphors.And yet the City, both unidentifiable and readily familiar, is also a place where the human questions and observations found in almost any citypast, present, and futurering out with urgency.

These poemsin turn elegiac, celebratory, haunting, grave, and joyfulgive hum to our modern experience, to all those caught up in the Citys immensity.

Reviews

"Wayne Miller [is] among the best poets in the USA at the moment [...] The City, Our City is through-composed, coherent in the unity of its parts, and terribly moving." --Notre Dame Review "Miller's combination of allegory, stark imagism, surrealist panache, and sophisticated tonal movement create a poem that is as dynamic as the architectural space of his city." --Micah Bateman, Kenyon Review Online "However grimly real, some of these poems are also truly beautiful [...] The City, Our City [reminds] us that poets still know its their job to think big and to find all sorts of ways to make their poems big as well." --Herman Asarnow, The Cincinnati Review "[A] wide-ranging, fascinating series of poems that [... has] the city as character at its center, the city as a collective soul, the city as idea." --David Blomenberg, Sycamore Review "The urban spaces explored in Miller's third collection (after The Book of Props) are less evocative of Whitman's tumultuous Mannahatta than of T. S. Eliot's 'Unreal City' [...] Like Eliot, Miller reveals a flair for haunting imagery [...] but it is the metaphysics of silent despair that he captures most effectively[.] [Miller's] attempts to link the symbolic significance of cities with the deep human needs that made them inevitable are often riveting." --Fred Muratori, Library Journal "The muse of this exquisite collection is an imagined contemporary metropolis [...] that thrives simultaneously with the lost cities it has risen from and falls toward, allowing the poet's urbanites to grasp the continuity of human tragedy and joy." --The Kansas City Star