We the Jury

Poetry

We the Jury

Poems
“A book of dark and sometimes surreal love poems from the heart of a man to his wife, his children, his nation, and his past.” —JERICHO BROWN
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Winner of the 2022 Colorado Book Award for Poetry

A boy asks his father what it means to die; a poet wonders whether we can truly know another’s thoughts; a man tries to understand how extreme violence and grace can occupy the same space. These are the questions Wayne Miller tackles in We the Jury: the hard ones, the impossible ones.

From an academic dinner party disturbing in its crassness and disaffection to a family struggling to communicate gently the permanence of death, Miller situates his poems in dilemma. He faces moments of profound discomfort, grief, and even joy with a philosopher’s curiosity, a father’s compassion, and an overarching inquiry at the crossroads of ethics and art: what is the poet’s role in making sense of human behavior? A bomb crater–turned–lake “exploding with lilies,” a home lost during the late-aughts housing crash—these images and others, powerful and resonant, attempt to answer that question.

Candid and vulnerable, Miller sits with us while we puzzle: we all wish we knew what to tell our children about death. But he also pushes past this and other uncertainties, vowing—and inviting us—to “expand our relationship / with Death,” and with every challenging, uncomfortable subject we meet. In the face of questions that seem impossible to answer, We the Jury offers not a shrug, but curiosity, transparency, a throwing of the arms wide.

Keywords: 
History; political poetry; persona poetry; fatherhood; death; the Great Recession; the middle class; nostalgia; memory; Ohio; family
ISBN:
9781571315311
Publish Date: 
03/09/2021
Pages: 
96
Size: 
8.5 × 5.5 × 0.25 in
Weight: 
6 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.

Praise and Prizes

Blog Post

Bailey Hutchinson – 04/02/2021

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