A river swollen and drained by tides, a dauntless heart pumping time, forms the center of How My Father Became a Boat. The collection begins in the last days of the speaker’s father before fanning out like the teeming deltas of its poems. Join the speaker: boating in coastal waters, traveling backroads to and from the river, and mining the dictionary for comfort. Explore the Gulf South as setting and lens on a journey from loss to hope.
In addition to interrogating how place contributes to identity, How My Father Became a Boat examines the nature of grief.
Poems speak to the speaker’s individual loss as well as to the collective grief of recognizing America’s frailties. Personal recollection and history mix like salt and fresh water in these pages. The resulting brackish water poems highlight the forces that drive us to cultivate hope for futures we cannot know.
John Miller’s powerful and captivating collection begins in media res, at his father’s deathbed, and broadens to encompass a series of carefully observed and fiercely imagined laments-for his brilliant and intimidating progenitor, but also for others important in the author’s life, for the watery terrain and hurricane lilies of his youth on the Gulf Coast, and-far from least-for the historical and present harms done to America’s most vulnerable. “The past is a prison the South is afraid to leave,” writes Miller, but vigorous and incisive remembrance, as embodied in these poems, has the power to open that locked cell and force its ghosts into the open.
Joel Brouwer, professor of English, University of Alabama
The mud flats, magnolias, and thunderheads of this collection evoke the Mobile delta with such perfection that readers will feel themselves in the humidity of a Southern night with the lapping of the tides as background music. Amid this poetic precision, Miller asks us to peel back layers of grief and family history to examine the multitude of stories, people, and places that make us who we are. Each line blooms with appreciation of the life that persists even in the face of loss. How My Father Became a Boat is both a celebration and an interrogation that is bound to enrich the readers who explore its pages.
Jessica Fordham Kidd, author of Bad Jamie
“Grief stems from the same root / as gravity,” John Miller reminds us in this incredible new book. How My Father Became a Boat is a collection of poems that reminds me of the doxologies of loss, a collection that “keep[s] the sacraments of language.” And it’s this sacramental language that dots the crest of each wave off some humid southern shore, finding the knotted clews of our shared grammars uttered about a deathbed where “loss is not a cleaving to / but a cleaving from.” Silences and absences fill each bright page here as Miller gives all of us a new elegy, a new “search for mirages that speak presence / but mean absence.” That is, he reminds us in the blank black, “how we find / the isn’t that is.”
Matthew Minicucci, winner of the Stafford/Hall Oregon Book Award
Rhythmic and musical, Miller’s words become a body of water and the reader becomes a boat rocking back and forth on each verse. “What’s a river?” the speaker’s three-year-old nephew asks in the titular poem, and indeed, only by reading the entire book does the reader find the answer to that profound question.
Sara Pirkle, author of The Disappearing Act
For those of us who have tried to use language to describe the unfathomable wake a life leaves behind it-particularly a father’s life-this book will give us hope. It can, indeed, be articulated. All of it. In John Miller’s beautiful new book, How my Father Became a Boat, grief’s complications-its “symmetries” and contradictions-are explored with incredible maturity, generosity, and even humor. I will keep re-reading this book as I keep trying to understand why, when we grieve, we always seem to “grieve anew.”
Lauren Slaughter, author of Spectacle
These aching portraits are word made flesh, word made clay, made coastline. My kind of holy. Miller saves us with his syllables. Just as Phil Levine did. And Brad Watson did. And Jane Kenyon.
Abraham Smith, author of Insomniac Sentinel and Dear Weirdo
This collection places Miller among the best Southern poets writing today.
Adam Vines, author of Lures, editor of Birmingham Poetry Review
John Miller
Another Untidy Pilgrim from coastal Alabama, John Miller grew up toting a dictionary to supper. His poems have appeared in Poetry South, Rockvale Review, Susurrus, and elsewhere. Paper Nautilus Press published Miller’s chapbook, Heat Lightning, in 2017. He teaches at the intersections of Humanities, Law, and Civic Engagement for New College at the University of Alabama.