Sending Christmas Cards to Huck and Hamlet by Joe Mills is one of the most original collections of poetry I have ever encountered--original because it treats the whole world of books, poems, stories, fairy tales not only as being somehow more real than reality itself but as our most important lifelines to reality itself.  In Mills's created world of Huck and Hamlet and Sleeping Beauty,  Rapunzel  and the Seven Dwarves, we laugh with each surprise, each ironic insight, each portrait of a world that is funnier, whackier, and more completely alive than our world.  There is about this book a sense of everything happening for the first time, even those literary events that seem to happen over and over.  What a pleasure this book gives the reader.

-       -  Anthony Abbott, award-winning author of five books of poetry, including If Words Could Save Us and the Pulitzer nominated The Girl in the Yellow Raincoat

 Love and Other Collisions

"The Guardian" and "The Husband" featured on "The Writer's Almanac" with Garrison Keillor

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"Joseph Mills is a poet who understands that Love’s great nemesis isn’t Hate but Time. Time and again, the poems in Love and Other Collisions explore the inherent pain created when Love and Time meet. This book stands as a chronicle of the speaker’s growth from a hopeful youth to a father carving out the best life he can for his own children to a man who is a helpless witness to his mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease. In the words of one poem, Mills “show[s] how you [can] make something of your life if only you [can] stand enough punishment over the years.” Love and Other Collisions is at once ambitious, unflinching, and tender—It is definitely a must-read."  —Shaindel Beers, author of A Brief History of Time (Salt Publishing, 2009)