We the Jury: Poems

(Paperback)

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Winner of the2022 Colorado Book Award for Poetry

A boy asks his father what it means to die; a poet wonders whether we can truly know anothers thoughts; a man tries to understand how extreme violence and grace can occupy the same space. These are the questions Wayne Miller tackles inWe the Jury: the hard ones, the impossible ones.

From an academic dinner party disturbingin its crassness and disaffection to a family struggling to communicate gently the permanence of death, Miller situates his poems indilemma. He faces moments of profound discomfort, grief, and even joy with a philosophers curiosity, a fathers compassion, and an overarching inquiry at the crossroads of ethics and art: what is the poets role in making sense of human behavior A bomb craterturnedlake exploding with lilies, a home lost during the late-aughts housing crashthese images and others, powerful and resonant, attempt to answer that question.

Candid and vulnerable, Miller sits with us while we puzzle: we all wish we knew what to tell our children about death. But he also pushes past this and other uncertainties, vowingand inviting usto expand our relationship / with Death, and with every challenging, uncomfortable subject we meet. In the face of questions that seem impossible to answer,We the Juryoffers not a shrug, but curiosity, transparency, a throwing of the arms wide.

Reviews

Praise for We the Jury

One of the most outstanding American poets of his generation . . . Millers poems face the unvarnished truth of racism and inequality with unsentimental and intriguing utterance. Sunday Independent (Ireland)

These entries candidly showcase the complexity of human contradictions, and the many forms of grief, doubt, and joy on offer. Moving between specific moments in history and ripe lyrical musings, these poems embrace the unanswerable, offering a deep and satisfying look at selfhood.Publishers Weekly

A sharply conceived and exquisitely written collection . . . Its especially striking to read these poems now, because they feel perfectly suited for our fractured times, but a collection this assured, this perfectly rendered, will remain fresh and equally resonant for future readers.Los Angeles Review

Astute and timely . . . Many-minded and formally diverse, [We the Jury] guides its reader through a gauntlet of American moments, personal and political, past and present, en route to what amounts, for this reader, to a sort of reckoning with the American identity and, within that identity, a speaker finding their place.D.S. Waldman, Poetry International

We the Jury is a good-hearted testament to not only the intricate treading of history but also to enduring love, and the radical strength required to thrive in a ravaged world . . . What Miller does with the expression and capacity of love is magnificent and indeed, memorable. The poems enlarge its concept, open it up in a way that is not a vague, distant thought to the reader, but rather, a real outward force, a gentle beckoning to every wild and quiet possibility.Southern Indiana Review

Millerskeptical, exact, yet not entirely without hopeis one of the best. On History, about the poets relationship with a convicted murderer, is surely one of the most nuanced explorations of justice (criminal or otherwise) that you are likely to read this year.California Review of Books

Poetry can transform the imagination, and the kind of changes Miller offers are ones we might shy away from. But the book itself is brave, and it makes me feel brave enough to face even the griefs and losses I have yet to encounter.Meridian

The poems are dramatic but understated, quiet in the way a bassoon can fill a room without alarming the audience; they are gifts of steady languageunpretentious, unambiguousin a world swarming with hornet-tipped voices . . . The poems are quiet like an iris bulb. If a reader puts her ear close, shell hear the ground rumbling.Colorado Review

An introspective call-to-action like no other . . . We the Jury delivers the informal findings of our conflicted and always-evolving existence and exposes the heart.RHINO

In We the Jury, Wayne Miller asks probing questions about joy, grief, mortality, and understanding others.Library Journal

At times heartbreaking, but always beautiful, We the Jury is a collection that does not shy away from the realities of lifethose of aging, of politics, of violence, or of loss.The West Review

Simultaneously devastating and stunningly beautiful . . . [Millers] is an unflinching, steady gaze, and he clearly feels and sees deeply, attending to the world around him through a lyric that manages to unpack complex ideas across a handful of carved, crafted lines.Rob Mclennan, on his blog

We the Jury is a book of dark and sometimes surreal love poems from the heart of a man to his wife, his children, his nation, and his past. Marveling at the age of things, Miller writes with an understanding of community and the knowledge that any one understanding must be questioned: we will come down upon us with the weight of our entire existence // even then not one of us // will truly understand what we have done.Its the subtleties and vulnerabilities of these poems that move them from a good look at recent history to a leap of lyric exploration.Jericho Brown

We the Jury is incisive and deeply personal, plumbing complex human questions (how do we belong, who decides what we belong to, how do we contend with the evidence of our mortality) in ways that feel both current and enduring. These poems are succinct, the line breaks taut and attentive, and the narratives profoundly compelling. Rich in image and full of the unexpected, We the Jury offers glimpses of a nation, a family, a life, and a mind at work piecing together (and picking apart) the stories that shape our individual and collective experience. A truly moving and meaningful book.Rebecca Lindenberg

There is no didacticism in We the Jury because the paradoxes, quandaries, and trespasses of our age are not presented for predetermined consumption. Through Millers wisdom and fearlessness, these spare, incisive lyrics drop us into a stark world. They bare what we fail to remember or what we fail to understand about our pseudo-productive, throwaway existence. Whether Miller implicates his speaker in our false economy or resists an indictment, he pays chilling attention to the present. That is, his curiosity is both passionate and disinterested. Moments of suspended wonder abound. In We, the Jury, every poem, measured and flawless, says, look with open eyes.Martha Serpas

We the Juryis a startling, radiant book. Miller dangles the hope to be lifted // into the purity of our politicsand then yanks it back with truth. The truth Cell phones buzzing in the pockets of massacred gay men is the best image we had / of what made us a nation. I admire so much, including Millers elemental gift for metaphor: the lit-up silence after a miscarriage; the vacant houses of the rich mute and clear, like still water. No American poet interrogates the ways our center cannot holdmiddle class, age, west, ragebetter, and more humanely, thanWayneMiller.Randall Mann

In his latest collection, We the Jury, Miller looks out at his world as a husband, a father, a citizen, and asks with honesty and rapture: What is this America, what is this life A keen observer, Miller is not disheartened by past atrocities and current struggles, but is compelled to hold them in front of him and be candid about what he sees . . . Throughout the book, Miller tackles plenty of tough topicsmiscarriage, heroin addiction, housing crisis, middle age, warbut all with a measure of gentleness and abundance. As he observes wisely, Bomb craters with time become ponds / exploding with lilies. Ben Groner, Parnassus

Author Bio

Wayne Miller is the author of Post-, winner of the Rilke Prize and the Colorado Book Award; The City, Our City, shortlisted for the Rilke Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award; The Book of Props, named a best poetry book of the year by Coldfront Magazine and the Kansas City Star; and Only the Senses Sleep, winner of the William Rockhill Nelson Award. He has received the George Bogin Memorial Award, the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, the Lyric Poetry Award, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Bess Hokin Prize, and a Fulbright Distinguished Scholarship to the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queens University Belfast. He is cotranslator of two books by the Albanian writer Moikom Zeqomost recently Zodiac, which was shortlisted for the PEN Center USA Award in Translationand coeditor of three books: Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century, Tamura Ryuichi: On the Life & Work of a 20th Century Master, and New European Poets. He teaches at the University of Colorado Denver, co-directs the Unsung Masters Series, and serves as editor/managing editor of Copper Nickel.