Jennifer Miller's poems startle the reader with emotional clarity,
darkness, and humor- and sometimes with beauty so vivid it hurts.
Her self-interrogations have the quality, and efficacy, of medieval
meditations. Tough, elegant, memorable work.-April Bernard, author
of Brawl & Jag
Thief shows again how a mind, tuned to the natural layers of
self-hood and the provinces of language in relation to social,
familial, and personal history, can turn about and rework pain and
human struggle into a magic symbolism of healing and triumph. Such
humor and insouciance are here in these lovely lyrics, but also
too, a prepossessing intellect that forages on what's possible for
our future.-Major Jackson, author of The Absurd Man
Like a modern-day Scheherazade, Jennifer Stewart Miller's curious
lyricism in Thief offers that rare thing in a collection of poems,
spot-on storytelling so absorbing you will not want to stop
reading. With clear-eyed focus and barefaced honesty, Miller
marries the domestic to the political to nature with heartbreak and
humor. Her poetry exposes in words what's genuine with "a clarity
you can't explain / because your tongue / lacks the fine bristles /
of a paintbrush..." -Elaine Sexton, author of Prospect/Refuge
Thief is a book of flip-sides-sorrow and humor, grief and
memory-and of paring down the inevitability of human loss to
gut-level animal persistence. These poems burgeon with the stuff of
lives lived over many years, but they go well beyond a family
story; they drill down into "the sacred interior / Not a still
life," gathering up all that has been lost but well aware of "all
the undoing to be done, even of the wrecked."-Brian Clements,
author of A Book of Common Rituals
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