Overview

Personal and political collide in Alice Miller’s fourth poetry collection, as she compares present-day Berlin, where she is a new mother, with the city her German-Jewish grandmother was forced to leave. Darting through bedrooms and empires, whispers and wars, bureaucracy and origin stories, these unpredictable poems invoke Mary Shelley, Homer, and the atom bomb to ask if we can ever find a new beginning. How many buildings and oceans, how many minutes and years, how many voices speak through us? And if the past is never past, can we ever repair the present?

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9781805966166

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Reviews

‘There aren’t many historians who sing, but singing is exactly what Alice Miller does in this new book—even as the histories she explores grow more complex and troubling, even as they edge closer and closer to home.’  Bill Manhir ‘A demanding and deeply rewarding book.’ Vincent O’Sullivan on What Fire Miller’s poems seem always susceptible—their arcs can be injured into new shapes, they are not set in their ways, or dully prefabricated. There’s a compelling, vulnerable person inside […]. These poems are genuinely unpredictable, a rare thing, and their momentary stances or voice-postures have about them an air of irrepressible at.’ Vidyan Ravinthiran (Poetry Book Society) on Nowhere Neare ‘Alice Miller knows what is at stake in the in nitesimal, the split second, the infra-thin. The poems in her scintillating collection […] make us aware of how precarious the earth’s crust is, how treacherous the ambient oceans can be, and how ephemeral we ourselves are as we traverse great distances through the air. Thee sensory richness of Miller’s poetry—her gift for evoking place through texture and season, situation through detail and lacuna—only emphasises her conviction that all that was ever loved or cherished must be swallowed up by the flow of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness.’  Ranjit Hoskote on Nowhere Nearer ‘An extraordinary book, a departure in style and tone from anything else like it in New Zealand poetry.’ Helen Lehndorf on The Limits

Author Information

Alice Miller is a writer from Aotearoa New Zealand living in Berlin. She is the author of three previous poetry collections and a novel. Her collection Nowhere Nearer (Pavilion, 2018) was a PBS Recommendation and her novel about Georgie Yeats, More Miracle than Bird (Tin House, 2020) was a New York Times summer selection. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the International Institute of Modern Letters, Alice is currently on the faculty of the MFA programme at Cedar Crest College.

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