Impossible Things

Miller Oberman is Director of First Year Writing at Eugene Lang College, The New School, and author of The Unstill Ones: Poems.

• Dedications  xiiPrologue: Two Lunches with my Father  xivAll These Beloved Books  1Memoir I  2Joshua Was Gone  3Memoir II  6The Wind Is Loud  7Memoir III  8Memoir IIIi  9Memoir IIIii  10The Pool, 2019  11Memoir IV  13Proper Identification  14Joy  16“if this was a different kind of story id tell you about the sea”  17Memoir V  19Taharah  20Memoir VI  21Twenty-three Facts about Joshua’s Death  22Memoir VII  23Dear Mr. Pennypacker  24Commas  25Joshua’s Birthday  26Pottstown Mercury, 1972  28Memoir VIII  30Memoir  IX  31Memoir  IXi  32History of Fingers  33Odo  36Theory  38Phoenixville, 2020  41The Centaur  43Giant Bird  44Memoir X  46On Similes  47Comes With  48Two Photographs  50Memoir X  51Memoir XII  52Memoir XIII  53The Field  54Your Are a Field of Little  62Memoir XIII  63Memoir XIV  64This and That at the Frick  65How to Sleep  66Memoir XV  67Memoir XVI  69Catskills Poem  70The Camels  71Memoir XVI  72Two Shabbats with Paul Celan  73Memoir XVII  75Northport  76Syntax, 2022  78Joanne Dies, 2017  79Memoir XVIII  80Jewish Cento, 1957  81Epilogue: Mensch  84Memoir Cento  87Memoir Cento i  90Memoir Cento ii  92The Cake  94Notes  97Acknowledgments  101

“In this compelling extended elegy, Miller Oberman captures both the possible and Impossible Things of a young child’s death and its effect on a family. I’ve been an admirer of Miller’s poetry since I first read ‘Joshua Was Gone,’ a masterly and devastating poem that embodies the heart and craft of this deeply moving book. Honoring both what’s missing and what remains, Impossible Things is a stunning book you will want to read, reread and keep close.” - Ellen Bass, author of (Indigo) "Impossible Things is, at its heart, a book-length elegy-it endeavors to speak with the dead so that the writer might go on living. To do so, Miller Oberman enacts a trans poetics that insists that an adequate description of everyday life requires admitting what is spectral, impossible, and not (yet) properly named. Anyway, I love these poems. They are tender and funny and charmingly neurotic. They are hurt and hurting, but not moralizing. They surface and bear contraction. They make me, somehow, alive." - Cameron Awkward-Rich, author of (The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment) "There is so much to admire in Oberman’s book-the way the father is never demonized, the frankness with which Oberman copes with his own early gender confusion and resulting abuse at the hands of other children, and the tenderness with which he writes about his transition to adulthood and his own children. The book is a breviary of pain and forgiveness." - Lisa Russ Spaar (The Adroit Journal) "In his book-length elegy Impossible Things, trans poet Miller Oberman explores 'intergenerational grief,' from the perspectives of being a trans child and a father, incorporating his late father’s unpublished memoir. The result is a deeply personal examination of the impacts of family and loss." - Gregg Shapiro (OutSFL) "The inability to truly know our parents is a ripe concept in literature, something timeless that most of us can relate to. Through drawing himself closer to his father in Impossible Things, Oberman offers the reader a chance to do the same as they read along, to ask questions there might not have been a time and place for while parents were alive, to tell stories that are not our own but which we are very much a part of, and to find parallels."- Alex DiFrancesco (Chicago Review of Books) "While his musings are tentative, careful, Oberman’s images are crisp and vivid. . . . Oberman crafts a shared disconnection, one that reverberates throughout." - Turi Sioson (Only Poems)