Midnights

Overview

Poet Jane Miller collaborates with artist Beverly Pepper on a highly personal journey through the debris of the poet’s crumbling relationship, and her mother’s descent into illness. Beautifully rendered poems and short chapters of poetic prose combine with Pepper’s chalk and oil drawings to form an intimate and unique meditation on the nature of love, of heartache, of the many midnights we, each and every one of us, live through and carry with us through our lives. “The goal is not to make sense of, but art of this story,” writes poet C.D. Wright in her introduction. “The goal is not to make a story but to experience the whole mess. There are mental sufferings and physical sufferings to go through; to apprehend if one can. There are the spent casings of history to sift through, pick up and examine. Calm-like, hysterical, forensic. This life not just a worn passage.” In the end, the light shines through Miller’s midnights and the rewards of passing through the darkness with her are countless.

Author Biography

JANE MILLER is the author of nine previous collections of poetry, most recently A Palace of Pearls (2005). She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and aLila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award. She lives in Tucson and teaches inthe creative writing program at The University of Arizona, havingserved as the program’s director from 1999 to 2003.