The Book of Props

“The mystery of sleep, the way a lit candle makes one the center of the dark: Wayne Miller’s an investigative reporter of consciousness, examining subjectivity as if there were no maps. And he’s right, there aren’t; every I awakes to its own peculiar presence—here given compelling form in rewarding, elegant lyrics.”

“In [The Book of Props], Wayne Miller quietly disassembles everyday life, identifying the rhetoric, folly, expectation, and artifice that make up the world… . Like his characters, Miller makes a vast impact using the smallest stroke—he is careful and suspenseful, wary of flamboyance.”

“A mesmerizing and elegant inquiry into the physics of being … Wayne Miller’s lyrics are steeped in longing, stoked by tender irony and luminous with heightened receptivity. Akin in spirit to the works of Wallace Stevens and Charles Simic, Miller’s poems are profoundly human in their philosophical puzzles.”

“Irresistibly sensual. Lush, lavish, and achingly accurate, Wayne Miller’s words have an almost corporeal realness to them—a kiss that becomes an object pressed between lovers, a ‘room that will be the ghost of right now / for as long as we carry it.’ I was transfixed by this book.”

“Wayne Miller’s poetry is entranced, luminous, supernaturally poised. He drifts through a world that is twilit, looming, strangely stilled, and somehow in need of his care, as if he had stayed up till some record late hour to watch over dreamers and scenes disarmed by sleep, a sad, fond ghost coaxing them to ‘surface into themselves.’ He is the purest kind of lyric poet, neither narrating nor explaining but saying over and over their beauty and poignance and power.”

“Elegant … The poems are at once dreamlike and fervent in their will to cleave to the material world… . Wayne Miller remains a poet to watch, and one who strives to ‘separate / the seeing from what’s seen.’”