The Limits

Overview

The poems in this extraordinary full-length collection ask you to force yourself beyond your own boundaries. They are curious, restless, and bold; they marry lyrical music and intricate metaphor as they search for other human voices beyond the rumblings of the apocalypse and the stubbornness of myth. From bare battlefields to crisp Antarctica to the gates of Troy, from rewritten history to love story, these poems ask for something more from the world than just riding till the spoke breaks. A poet for whom one way is easy but an easy way is worse, Miller traces a path that leads beyond our limits to where we set the sky on silent, where we’re braver than science, and where we try to unglimpse what we’ve lost.

Reviews

“Alice Miller is a musician and was once a historian, and these poems are full of the lyrical texture of time: ancient stories playing their notes against contemporary facts and feeling. At the same time, her book takes us far beyond its title, letting us glimpse again and again—in finite space—what is limitless.”  —Bill Manhire, inaugural poet laureate of New Zealand

Author Biography

Alice Miller is a writer of poetry, plays, essays, and fiction. She is associate editor of the Vienna Review and is currently in summer residency at the Michael King Writers’ Centre in Auckland. She has won the Royal Society of New Zealand Manhire Prize, the prize for the Landfall Essay Competition, a Creative New Zealand Louis Johnson Bursary, and the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Premier Award for fiction. Her writing has appeared in the American Scholar, Best New Zealand Poems Online, Boston Review, the Iowa Review, Narrative Magazine, NZ Listener, Landfall, and Sport.