BLUE RUST DESCRIPTION

Like Conrad’s Marlow, Joseph Millar speaks with fierce compassion and the authority of hard-won experience. In his remarkable third collection, Blue Rust, he lays down “the shield of irony” without taking up the consolations of easy sentiment or detached despair. The result is an unstrained originality: lyrics that avoid the metronome, leaps of imagination in which the associative logic never trails off into self-indulgent incoherence. Millar looks hard at a world that is doomed and beautiful. What sets Blue Rust apart is its ability to honor both sides.

"If you want the real news of how America lives, of what it's like to be here with us...Millar will tell you with exactitude and delicacy in poems like none you've read before. He knows a country, an America, that's been here all along waiting for its voice. It's time we listened."

-Philip Levine

"Millar can ride a poem into some wildly imaginative territory, and he knows how to sound the blue note at just the right moment. His impulse is to tell a story, but he never forgets, as a poet, to tell it one line at a time."

-Billy Collins

"Hard luck and hard living have schooled Millar's voice in verities seldom glimpsed in contemporary poetry: the bone-weary truths of tradesmen and laborers running cable through our malls, of Alaskan fishermen pulling on frozen nets...a compassionate eye and careful ear for the hard lyricism of what Gerard Manley Hopkins called all trades, their gear and tackle and trim. A rich, wonderfully refreshing book.”  

-John Balaban

"Only someone who has a deep capacity to love and enjoy the music of life could have written these wonderful, troubling poems. There is 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

“No intellectual wink mars the poems, no one is pilloried, nothing manufactured. The forgiveness in this voice makes us feel brave.” 

-Barry Lopez