The City, Our City
Poetry

The City, Our City

By
Wayne Miller
Finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award
Select Format

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
Pages
126
Dimensions
5.56 × 8.5 × 0.31 in
Weight
6.5 oz
Cover Art

Related Media

Watch: A Reading with Wayne Miller | American Book Review
Author

Wayne Miller

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.

Praise and Prizes

  • “Fierce lyrical investigations that move in and out of the personal, the historical, and the allegorical … It’s the simultaneity of intimacy and alienation in reading Wayne Miller’s book that recommends it most. It’s an experience you’ll want to think about in our divided, post-election, political landscape.”

    Kenyon Review

  • “This City is less personal, less located in a particular time and place, than Philip Levine’s Detroit, though just as dark… . Wayne Miller rams fissionable pieces of history into critical masses of present moments and images to make his subject—human culture as symbolized by the city—explode into meaning.”

    Cincinnati Review

  • “Wayne Miller has written an astonishing book-length sequence. The City, Our City moved and entertained me in the oddest, most compelling ways. Miller’s scope is as large as anyone’s in his generation.”

    David Rivard

  • “These poems are liberating in their strangeness and at the same time they compel us. Their voices are ours, cut into myth.”

    Ilya Kaminsky

  • “Any City’s name might be scrawled in the open wound—Baghdad, New York, Dresden, Tel Aviv, El Fasher. These poems deal with that last trace of movement at the end of things.”

    Eleni Sikelianos

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