Shine

Joseph Millar's lyrical poems explore work, love, filial connection, life, and death. This is Millar's sixth collection, and it reaches a deeper, more sonic level than his usual narrative voice. A collection of half songs rendered in a hardscrabble lyricism, they are propelled by their shifting, irregular rhymes, half rhymes, and off rhymes. The poems' subjects grow from moments of daily life and their deeper obsessions--love, work, death, desire--and the making of art itself. Touched with more humor than earlier work, and with an unpredictable timing that seems to listen to itself as it travels down the page, the poems are part wonder and part reflection, carried along by their music.