Poetry

ISBN: 1-59766-026-4
Cloth: $22.95

Joseph Millar’s first collection, Overtime (Eastern Washington University Press, 2001), was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Millar grew up in Pennsylvania and took an MA from Johns Hopkins in 1970. It would be two decades before he returned to poetry. His poetry’s clean lyric voice, its stark, unsparing narratives, chronicle a life fully lived. Fathers, brothers, daughters, sons, weddings, deaths, divorce: all play their part in this second collection from a poet who can neither look away from our failures nor ignore the bright whims of fortune. His work has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Oregon Literary Arts. In 1997 he gave up his job as telephone installation foreman and moved to western Oregon, where he teaches at Oregon State University and in Pacific University’s low residency MFA program.

Joseph Millar received an MA from Johns Hopkins in 1970. In addition to teaching at Oregon State University, Corvallis, he has spent much of the past two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. He lives in Eugene, Oregon, with his wife, poet Dorianne Laux.

“There's a tenderness at the core of Fortune, where the commonplace becomes atypical and fantastical, and each poem possesses a voice that summons and reveals. Joseph Millar is a poet we can believe.”

—Yusef Komunyakaa, Pulitzer Prize winner

Fortune grows out of ruin, out of the deep wounds of history: a young boy losing his mother, mental illness, alcoholism. Much blood-stained beauty here—lush singing—a fierce and tender voice.

—Anne Marie Macari, author of Ivory Cradle (2000) and Gloryland (2005)