The City, Our City

The City, Our City
Poetry

The City, Our City

Finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award
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A breakout collection that showcases the voice of a young poet striking out, dramatically, emphatically, to stake his claim on “the City”—an unnamed, crowded place filled with gunmen, lovers, children, neighbors, builders, soldiers, professors, bouncers, and widowers.

In this series of semi-mythologized, symbolic narratives interspersed with dramatic monologues, Wayne Miller presents a city laden with “kisses in doorways, weapons / and sculptures, concerts / and fistfights, sex toys and votives, / engines and metaphors.” And yet the City, both unidentifiable and readily familiar, is also a place where the human questions and observations found in almost any city—past, present, and future—ring out with urgency.

These poems—in turn elegiac, celebratory, haunting, grave, and joyful—give hum to our modern experience, to all those caught up in the City’s immensity.

ISBN:
9781571314451
Publish Date: 
09/13/2011
Pages: 
126
Size: 
5.56 × 8.5 × 0.31 in
Weight: 
6.5 oz
Author

Wayne Miller is the author of five collections of poems, including Post- and We the Jury, forthcoming March 2021. He is also a cotranslator of two books from the Albanian poet Moikom Zeqo, and a coeditor of three anthologies, including Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century and New European Poets. Miller is a professor of English at the University of Colorado Denver, where he edits Copper Nickel.

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