Thunderbird

Bright, spiky, bold, immediate, and not always eager to explain itself, this latest collection from Audre Lord Prize winner Miller (A Palace of Pearls) finds the speaker drenched in ecstasy ("in a mist of particles"), grappling with "a brain crushed sideways," grabbing "brute memory" as the sole guard against oblivion, bowing to fate ("a cat loose among hounds/ that I do not think got killed by accident"), relentlessly puzzled ("why is someone from time immemorial/ hiding young consenting neighbors/ in the dark must of a cemetery// for a release of warm semen"), but determined to bear witness ("Celan and Mandelstam depart in a boxcar/ before strangely burning down to darkness") and open-minded even when she's floundering ("I am the world's worst compass/ just curious"). It's an onslaught of emotion, and if (like the reader) the speaker can feel overmastered, she's got fight: "the will is not free/ …but gets it up faster than a porn star." In the end, Miller strongly discounts the idea that what she's saying to us "is only language," for, as she proves, language is powerful and cannot be undone.