Only someone who has a deep capacity to love and enjoy the music of life could have written these wonderful, troubling poems. There's a tenderness at the core of Fortune, where the commonplace becomes atypical and fantastical,a nd eazch poem possesses a voice that summons and reveals. Joseph Millar is a poet we can believe.—Yusuf Komunyakaa, winner of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for poetry "If you want the real news of how America lives, of what it's like to be here with us, Millar will tell you with exactitude and delicacy in poems like none you've read before. He know a country, an America, that's been here all along waiting for its voice. It's time we listened."—Philip Levine, Ploughshares
JOSEPH MILLAR's first collection, Overtime (2001) was finalist for the Oregon Book Award. A second collection, Fortune, appeared in 2007. Millar grew up in Pennsylvania, attended Johns Hopkins University and spent 25 years in the San Francisco Bay area working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. It would be two decades before he returned to poetry. His poems--stark, clean, unsparing--record the narrative of a life fully lived among fathers, sons, brothers, daughters, weddings and divorces, men and women. His work has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2008 Pushcart Prize and has appeared in such magazines as DoubleTake, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, APR, and Ploughshares. In 1997 he gave up his job as telephone installation foreman to try his hand at teaching. A new chapbook, Bestiary, is now available from Red Dragonfly Press, and a third collection, Blue Rust, will be published by Carnegie-Mellon in fall of 2011. Millar is now core faculty at Pacific University's Low Residency MFA and lives in Raleigh, NC, with his wife, the poet Dorianne Laux.
