Overview

Offering an intimate account of intergenerational grief, Miller Oberman’s new collection of poetry, Impossible Things, explores his experiences as both a transgender child and father. Oberman weaves in passages from his own deceased father’s unpublished memoir to engage with the mysterious drowning of his eldest brother, Joshua, at age two, a tragedy that cast a shadow over his childhood. He depicts his own youth and parenthood in the context of his father’s trauma, employing queer and trans theory and experimental poetic forms to challenge and expand discourse around fatherhood and masculinity. Oberman moves beyond an attempt to solve the mystery of Joshua’s death and interrogates how much we can ever know about our forebears or understand their impacts on our lives. Impossible Things offers a necessary intervention into the well-worn terrain of fatherhood/boyhood memoir and functions as a living elegy, communicating with the past, the dead, and the unknowable while speaking to the possibilities for healing intergenerational trauma.

Full Product Details

Author:   Miller Oberman
Publisher:   Duke University Press
Imprint:   Duke University Press
Weight:   0.340kg
ISBN:  

9781478026860

ISBN 10:   1478026863
Pages:   120
Publication Date:   22 October 2024
Audience:   General/trade ,  Professional and scholarly ,  General ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Dedications  xii Prologue: Two Lunches with my Father  xiv All These Beloved Books  1 Memoir I  2 Joshua Was Gone  3 Memoir II  6 The Wind Is Loud  7 Memoir III  8 Memoir IIIi  9 Memoir IIIii  10 The Pool, 2019  11 Memoir IV  13 Proper Identification  14 Joy  16 “if this was a different kind of story id tell you about the sea”  17 Memoir V  19 Taharah  20 Memoir VI  21 Twenty-three Facts about Joshua’s Death  22 Memoir VII  23 Dear Mr. Pennypacker  24 Commas  25 Joshua’s Birthday  26 Pottstown Mercury, 1972  28 Memoir VIII  30 Memoir  IX  31 Memoir  IXi  32 History of Fingers  33 Odo  36 Theory  38 Phoenixville, 2020  41 The Centaur  43 Giant Bird  44 Memoir X  46 On Similes  47 Comes With  48 Two Photographs  50 Memoir X  51 Memoir XII  52 Memoir XIII  53 The Field  54 Your Are a Field of Little  62 Memoir XIII  63 Memoir XIV  64 This and That at the Frick  65 How to Sleep  66 Memoir XV  67 Memoir XVI  69 Catskills Poem  70 The Camels  71 Memoir XVI  72 Two Shabbats with Paul Celan  73 Memoir XVII  75 Northport  76 Syntax, 2022  78 Joanne Dies, 2017  79 Memoir XVIII  80 Jewish Cento, 1957  81 Epilogue: Mensch  84 Memoir Cento  87 Memoir Cento i  90 Memoir Cento ii  92 The Cake  94 Notes  97 Acknowledgments  101

Reviews

“In this compelling extended elegy, Miller Oberman captures both the possible and Impossible Things of a young child’s death and its effect on a family. I’ve been an admirer of Miller’s poetry since I first read ‘Joshua Was Gone,’ a masterly and devastating poem that embodies the heart and craft of this deeply moving book. Honoring both what’s missing and what remains, Impossible Things is a stunning book you will want to read, reread and keep close.” -- Ellen Bass, author of * Indigo * ""Impossible Things is, at its heart, a book-length elegy—it endeavors to speak with the dead so that the writer might go on living. To do so, Miller Oberman enacts a trans poetics that insists that an adequate description of everyday life requires admitting what is spectral, impossible, and not (yet) properly named. Anyway, I love these poems. They are tender and funny and charmingly neurotic. They are hurt and hurting, but not moralizing. They surface and bear contraction. They make me, somehow, alive."" -- Cameron Awkward-Rich, author of * The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment * ""There is so much to admire in Oberman’s book—the way the father is never demonized, the frankness with which Oberman copes with his own early gender confusion and resulting abuse at the hands of other children, and the tenderness with which he writes about his transition to adulthood and his own children. The book is a breviary of pain and forgiveness."" -- Lisa Russ Spaar * The Adroit Journal *

“In this compelling extended elegy, Miller Oberman captures both the possible and Impossible Things of a young child’s death and its effect on a family. I’ve been an admirer of Miller’s poetry since I first read ‘Joshua Was Gone,’ a masterful and devastating poem that embodies the heart and craft of this deeply moving book. Honoring both what’s missing and what remains, Impossible Things is a stunning book you will want to read, re-read and keep close.” -- Ellen Bass, author of * Indigo *

"“In this compelling extended elegy, Miller Oberman captures both the possible and Impossible Things of a young child’s death and its effect on a family. I’ve been an admirer of Miller’s poetry since I first read ‘Joshua Was Gone,’ a masterful and devastating poem that embodies the heart and craft of this deeply moving book. Honoring both what’s missing and what remains, Impossible Things is a stunning book you will want to read, re-read and keep close.” -- Ellen Bass, author of * Indigo * ""Impossible Things is, at its heart, a book-length elegy—it endeavors to speak with the dead so that the writer might go on living. To do so, Oberman enacts a trans poetics that insists that an adequate description of everyday life requires admitting what is spectral, impossible, not (yet) properly named. Anyway, I love these poems. They are tender and funny and charmingly neurotic. They are hurt and hurting, but not moralizing. They surface and bear contraction. They make me, somehow, alive."" -- Cameron Awkward-Rich, author of * The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment *"

Author Information

Miller Oberman is Director of First Year Writing at Eugene Lang College, The New School, and author of The Unstill Ones: Poems.

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