MEDIA & PRESS

Reviews

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.
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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
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". . . 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
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"An expansive, thought-provoking, beautifully rendered collection containing some of the poet’s finest work to date." — J. Scott Brownlee, Rattle
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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
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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