MEDIA & PRESS

Reviews

Shine

"The difficult grace of dailiness and the defiant resilience of the spirit have always been at the heart of Millar’s poetry. Book by book, line by carefully carved line, Millar has been writing the finest poetry about work and material presence in our world since those of his exemplar, Philip Levine. Millar’s elemental belief in those around him, an unfailing tenderness, and his fabulous jazz-inflected diction are the polishes by which the American grain of these poems is made luminous. Read this book; watch it shine."
— David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour

"Joseph Millar possesses a lyric intelligence that exalts the quotidian, that’s deeply humane. His poems track and transfigure friendship, old age, silence, and love’s effervescent intimacies. But his lyricism, his language, doesn’t enlarge the distance between what’s observed and the self; instead, it brings the world closer to the body. All that blossoms, all that decays surrounds the speaker in these poems. Millar trusts poetry to reveal something vital. After reading this book, I trust him and his poems."
— Eduardo Corral, author of Slow Lightning and Guillotine

"What Joe Millar’s carefully wrought and elegantly shaped poems remind us in their sonic beauty and power, is that the rhyme is a kind of reassurance of grace, a surprising harmony that arrives with the sense of rightful order in a world of mortal chaos and emotional shadows. These poems shine for their splendid engineering, machines much like the new stars of his title poem, that keep 'shining on life and death.'"
— Kwame Dawes, author of Sturge Town, Norton 2024

Dark Harvest

"Supremely sensory, everything in a Joseph Millar poem shimmers with authenticity. His is a hard-earned sensibility without a wisp of pretense. Unsurprisingly, the new poems are again spectacularly good: calmly visionary while tethered to the rough and ready. Millar’s poems give shape to the bounty of plenty and the abundance of loss in a faulty world. One comes away knowing and, yes, feeling more of what it is to be fully awake. Dark Harvest is a book to keep at hand." —Marvin Bell

"Wandering the narrow alleyways of these poems, into the bottomlands, I think of a Midrashic teaching someone told me: God made the world because he desired a dwelling place in the lowest realm. Why not here, among Millar’s vagabonds and crows, his fishermen, trash fires and salt, 'the restless claws of the ocean / turning the pebbles and rocks and sand, / tumbling the chitin and shell fragments / ceaselessly and forever...'" —Danusha Lameris, author of Bonfire Opera

"Joseph Millar’s new and selected is a feast of a book; epic in span, intimate in approach. With a deep lyric sensibility, Millar elevates the lives of 'ordinary' Americans into the matter of the sublime. He weaves the quotidian and ineffable into a love real and true." —Chris Abani, author of Sanctificum and Smoking the Bible

"Discovering this work is like finding an old wooden crate filled with pristine hand grenades. Each of these poems can shatter you in multiple directions simultaneously."—Peter Coyote, author, actor, and Zen Buddhist Priest

Kingdom

"There is a gentleness to these poems, even when considering failure, 'this soft body that consumes everything.' These poems are full of wonder, full of 'bells of evening,' and full of quiet, ruthless joy."—Whale Road Review

"This is a brave collection, deeply engaged with life. These poems are vivid and direct —they are blazons marking our mortal trail, a guide to our interior lives. They document what it means to be a human moving through this world, this kingdom." —Martin Saunders, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Read the complete review here.

Blue Rust

"Joseph Millar speaks with fierce compassion and the authority of hard-won experience. In his remarkable third collection, Blue Rust, he lays down “the shield of irony” without taking up the consolations of easy sentiment or posturing despair." —Tim McBride, Prarie Schooner
Read the complete review here {PDF}

". . . a man keen to true the level on language without betraying much anxiety over language's ability to underwrite authenticity. Here is also the kind of person you would like to knock back a few with, whose indictments against life's injustices don't spread out and try to guilt-trip the other bar patrons."— David Rigsbee, Cortland Review
Read the complete review here {PDF}

"An expansive, thought-provoking, beautifully rendered collection containing some of the poet’s finest work to date." — J. Scott Brownlee, Rattle
Read the complete review here {PDF}

Overtime

"Millar's best poems transcend everyday existence, not by tidily wrapping up the story with a moral message, but by doing the opposite—leaving the reader with glimpses into unfinished stories, as lives truly are." —Julie Drake, Rain Taxi Review of Books
Read the complete review here {PDF}

Poems Online

"The Sacred Altar of Poetry," "Wildfire Season," "December 2020," and "Shine Through" from Five Points (PDF)

"One Day" and "Venetian Siesta," Poets.org

"Labor Day" at Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry

"Telephone Repairman" in The Writer's Almanac

"Ocean" in The American Poetry Review