We the Jury: Poems

By Wayne Miller

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

From an academic dinner party disturbing in its crassness and disaffection to a family struggling to communicate gently the permanence of death, Miller situates these poems—taut and spare, yet rich in their images and full of unexpected turns—in dilemma. He faces moments of profound discomfort, grief, and even joy with a philosopher’s curiosity, a father’s compassion, and an overarching inquiry at the crossroads of ethics and art: what is the poet’s role in making sense of human behavior? A bomb crater–turned–lake “exploding with lilies,” a home lost during the late-aughts housing crash—these 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, vowing—and inviting us—to “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 Jury offers not a shrug, but curiosity, transparency, an opening of the arms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Release date: Mar 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781571317193

Wayne Miller

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 Queen’s University Belfast. He is cotranslator of two books by the Albanian writer Moikom Zeqo—most recently Zodiac, which was shortlisted for the PEN Center USA Award in Translation—and 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.

Book preview

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