Jim Miller

"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

"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, The Alchemy of Us

Exposing the hollowness of San Diego’s boom years, Drift uncovers the hidden past of this southwestern mecca—a history inhabited by the likes of Emma Goldman, Henry Miller, Mission Indians, and Theosophists—and captures the underlying emptiness and unease of San Diego circa 2000. Joe Blake plays the postmodern flâneur in a theme-park city, drifting with the poetic eye of Baudelaire and the critical sensibilities of Walter Benjamin and the Situationist avant-garde. Depicting the sex, drugs, and death found in the borderlands, author Jim Miller portrays a city where cultures sometimes clash but more often pass one another almost wholly unaffected.

Last Days in Ocean Beach is the story of William, a scientist working at the Center for Extinction Studies, a think tank at the College of the Sun funded by a green billionaire. William lives “on the border between dread and wonder” as he desperately works to raise the alarm about climate change and its dire consequences to an apathetic public, learns to live with grief, and hold on to love. Along the way, we meet the residents of his wonderfully shabby apartment complex in Ocean Beach--bikers, hippies, skate punks, adventure tourists, reggae singers, aimless young professionals, Iraq war veterans, decadent retirees, a hospice nurse, and a Buddhist monk, all of whom are searching for something, looking to live more fully. Last Days in Ocean Beach is a blues song moaning and rocking the beach party at the end of the world.

Who is Bobby Flash? Flash is a novel that follows the journey of muckracking journalist Jack Wilson as he investigates the century-old mystery of the identity of I.W.W. outlaw and revolutionary, Bobby Flash. When Wilson finds an old Wanted poster in a local archive in San Diego, his curiosity leads him deep into the lost history of America's radical past through the Free Speech fights and the Magonista revolt in Mexico, the utopian Llano del Rio Colony, and the first red scare. Bobby Flash crosses paths with the likes of Emma Goldman, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Ben Reitman, and Big Bill Hayward as well as a myriad of other unknown tramps and revolutionaries. The reader even gets to see if it's possible for Jack to sneak a portion of Joe Hill's ashes through Homeland Security. Along the way we learn the story of the women who work in contemporary Tijuana's maquiladoras and others struggling to make a living at working class jobs in Los Angeles, San Diego and the San Francisco Bay area. Flash is also the story of the love of a father and son and their unexpected discovery of their family legacy, including a grandmother committed to the ideals of revolution and free-love at the turn-of-the-century. This novel begins in contemporary Southern California and takes the reader through the LA punk and underground scenes, San Diego's lost sailor town, and bohemian San Francisco and inner city Oakland ending finally on the Lost Coast Highway at a fledgling utopian commune. Flash speaks directly to current economic concerns and the yearning for hope and justice. 

For fourteen million tourists each year, San Diego is the fun place in the sun that never breaks your heart. But America’s eighth-largest city has a dark side of militarization, economic inequality, municipal corruption, and racial injustice.

This alternative civic history deconstructs the mythology of “America’s finest city.” Acclaimed urban theorist Mike Davis documents the secret history of the domineering elites who have turned a weak city government into a powerful machine for private wealth. Jim Miller tells the story from the other side: chronicling the history of protest in San Diego from the Wobblies to today’s “globalphobics.” Kelly Mayhew, meanwhile, presents the voice of paradise’s forgotten working people and new immigrants. The texts are vividly enhanced by archival photographs from the San Diego Historical Society, as well as images from photographer Fred Lonidier.

The silver-and-black-clad Oakland Raiders fans are the most notorious in American proessional sports, with a mythic reputation for cursing, drinking, brawling, and generally wreaking mayhem. The devotion of the team's multiracial, largely blue-collar supporters runs deep, creating a profound sense of community. As Jim Miller and Kelly Mayhew reveal in this hair-raising and entertaining book, the self-described Raider Nation, smitten with it outlaw mystique, provides a gritty alternative to CAlifornia's sunshine-and-granola image.