I am excited to announce the publication of my two latest books, Into the Bardo and Paradise and Other Lost Places, both of which are poetry collections.
Into the Bardo (available here) chronicles my series of near-death experiences that I experienced last year. These poems were written in real time from before my diagnosis to the precipice of death and back. All of them were composed in the midst of my health crisis, some in hospital beds, others during my recovery. It is my book of the damned and my journal of redemption.
"Jim Miller's Into the Bardo reminds us that everything is 'tentative and precious.' After experiencing a harrowing summer of several near-death experiences, it was poetry that Miller summoned, to bear witness to what he learned on this journey. In these poems, readers navigate the sometimes-precarious waters between wakefulness and sleep, life and death, treading in the liminal spaces of uncertainty. In fact, it was the great Roman poets, Virgil and Ovid, who taught us, Somnus, the god of sleep, was indeed the brother of Death. It is in this nexus where we find Miller revisiting memories of family and friends, the marvels of travel, the percipience of the arts, and ultimately, his musings on the 'interconnectedness of all,' especially as he beckons us to confront the economic and health care disparities that so many still endure. Miller reexamines a life lived while all along urging us to 'feel the multi-grained texture of life / as it flows on ceaselessly / past even death.' Into the Bardo is full of wonder and wisdom."
-Manuel Paul López, Nerve Curriculum
Whereas Into the Bardo, is a chronicle of my recent dance with death, Paradise and Other Lost Places (available here) is the product of the subsequent recovery period when I had the time to revise and edit a large selection of work on Maui before and after the catastrophic fires there, a selection of recent poems, and a batch of pieces that cover the last forty years of my life as a poet and writer.
While it is true that poetry in general has a much smaller market than nonfiction and fiction, getting this book into the world when I was not sure I would even live to see it come into print is deeply meaningful. Somewhere still inside is my younger self who started writing poems by hand in a tattered notebook, dreaming of being a poet without giving a thought to anything but the idea of the transformational power of the unhindered imagination and the notion that life itself is a kind of art.
Thanks to my good fried Perry Vasquez for his gorgeous cover art on both books and Kendra Lee for this fine blurb as well as comrades in verse Alys Masek, Hector Martinez, and Manuel Paul López for their close reading, editing, and evaluation of this project.
"Philosophical, lush and gritty, this collection answers a central question: How much pain and sweetness can fit into one man's life? This is life on the knife's edge where the deep well of grief…gives birth to joy. Miller, gimlet-eyed, turns his lens to city streets, motels, cemeteries, union workers, histories of oppression. Climate change, Lahaina burned. But also: the deep green jungle, the cerulean sea, a flock of hens, a gospel choir. An On The Road travelogue to Maui, Tijuana, Toledo, Chicago, Montana, the Salton Sea, Detroit, L.A. and more, each place a bittersweet cocktail of love and loss. These poems are world-weary and world-loving: 'The world is burning faster and more furiously/than even our love can repair…but also know that/we are always becoming,/like the newly formed shoots/on the scorched banyan tree.' Miller says it best: 'There is no describing the vast love that wells up in you when you find yourself in rapture with the stunning, naked radiance of the world.'"
--Kendra Tanacea, author of The Alchemy of Us
I'll be doing readings both live and virtual in the coming weeks.