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Book Cover for: Blue Rust, Joseph Millar

Blue Rust

Joseph Millar

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.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Carnegie-Mellon University Press
  • Publish Date: Jan 4th, 2012
  • Pages: 88
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.30in - 5.40in - 0.30in - 0.30lb
  • EAN: 9780887485497
  • Categories: American - General

About the Author

Millar, Joseph: - Joseph Millar is the author of Overtime, Fortune, Blue Rust, Kingdom, and Dark Harvest. His work has won a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches in the low-residency MFA in Writing Program at Pacific University in Oregon and lives in Richmond, California.

Praise for this book

There's so much kindness and honesty in these poems . . . long spiraling sentences full of used cars and kung pao chicken, umbilical blood and rent money, lentils and sausage and death. . . . "Blue Rust" is a big beautiful book of poems--moving, sensuous, artful, full of courage and blessings. I love it.

--Tony Hoagland

This book is terrific. Whether it's the true grit of blue rust or the true reckoning of the "blue compass needle," Millar's poems show us the verities of our human journeys. This is truly a poet of the people, a voice for our time.

--Barbara Ras

Millar writes about people with grease on their hands, ordinary men and women trying to make it in a hard luck world. His poems always seem to be in motion, arriving or departing, true to the rhythm of our lives. He can be as consoling as a lucky red sweater, and as irreverent as your middle finger. He's a pleasure at every turn of the page.

--Peter Everwine

Joseph Millar's "Blue Rust" is one of the most beauti