Overview

"A collection that explores inherited trauma on an individual and communal level, from a National Poetry Series-winning poet who ""refus es the mind's limits"" (Carol Muske-Dukes) Borderline Fortune is a meditation on intangible family inheritance-of unresolved intergenerational conflicts and traumas in particular-set against the backdrop of our planetary inheritance as humans. As species go extinct and glaciers melt, Teresa K. Miller asks what we owe one another and what it means to echo one's ancestors' grief and fear. Drawing on her family history, from her great-grandfather's experience as a schoolteacher on an island in the Bering Strait to her father's untimely death, as well as her pursuit of regenerative horticulture, Miller seeks through these beautifully crafted poems to awaken from the intergenerational trance and bear witness to our current moment with clarity and attention."

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9780143136811

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Advance praise for Borderline Fortune Teresa K. Miller explores startling territories in Borderline Fortune. She addresses the lines we've drawn and erased for centuries on the earth--that conform to the borders we cross and uncross in the mind. Yet: 'I'm asking you to believe in what you've never seen or heard, ' she writes, refusing the mind's limits. Here is the dark power of climate change where she finds 'the future all danger, heat, & scarcity.' Blake, Dickinson, and Hopkins' Terrible Sonnets hover ('birds build--but not I build'), above trees cut down and hope with feathers. The damage done to the earth echoes the damages to the protean mind of the poet--but Miller remains radiantly elusive, an escape artist in these marvelous poems of altered terra firma and revelation. --Carol Muske-Dukes, author of Blue Rose In Borderline Fortune, Teresa K. Miller claws her way to and through her subject--loss in the form of 'shrapnel and good intention.' Awareness: It's a hard journey. The human voice calls in ragged gasps, how did we get here? But unlike Rumi who blithely says, 'Whoever brought me here will have to take me home, ' Miller's voice has been dragged to this shore and pressed under. To write is to imagine, and Miller discovers in the going, in the moment when we remember that 'every river had a first day to flow.' Through Miller's poems, we are given that first day, no matter what comes after. We find hope for another way of being in the world. --David Romtvedt, National Poetry Series-winning author of A Flower Whose Name I Do Not Know and Dilemmas of the Angels In the sweeping expanses of Borderline Fortune, Teresa K. Miller grapples with the complexity of inheritance, the complicated legacies of family, history, and place. What created us, and what do we in turn create? How closely twined are belonging and betrayal? Here, history, identity, and the natural world meet and merge: a riven nausea in the cambium, / some needle-leafed private anguish. Geography itself is sentient and responsive: lies twine into granite, brine/ into mineral creatures made of lace. In the end, the poems form a landscape we must immerse ourselves in, their movement as dark and unpredictable as the ocean or tectonic plates, and their story one we don't navigate as much as survive: Haul/ yourself out, / one frozen leg at a time. --Laura Walker, author of swarm lure and psalmbook

Author Information

A graduate of Barnard College and the Mills College MFA program, Teresa K. Miller is the author of sped (Sidebrow) and Forever No Lo (Tarpaulin Sky) as well as co-editor of Food First: Selected Writings from 40 Years of Movement Building (Food First Books). Her poems and essays have appeared in ZYZZYVA, AlterNet, Entropy, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. Originally from Seattle, she tends a mini orchard near Portland, Oregon.

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