Reviews

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