Joseph Mills
Bodies in Motion
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Bodies in Motion roves the sprawling terrain of the body and its adventures in wonder, love, boredom, misfortune, and mortality. Painting dance as a multiplicity of actions and longings, beginning with a small detail, an expression of the everyday, only to reveal something about the quirks of the universe. Overall, Mills offers the reader a roadmap by which to consider their own lives in movement: where they’ve been, where they are, and why every life lived dancing is one worth talking about.
—Cara Hagan, artist/scholar
Bodies in Motion is connected by poems about dance but artfully twirls between characters doing the funky chicken in the kitchen to dancing The Nutcracker on stage to a gym packed with shuffling adolescents. It steps back and forth in time with the movements of black holes in the universe, George Washington, Charles Dickens, wedding receptions, parents and their families, dance classes, Hollywood musicals, and more. Regardless of how many left feet you may have, you’ll enjoy the show.
—Matt Mason, Nebraska State Poet and author of I Have a Poem the Size of the Moon
Bleachers
​In Bleachers, Joe Mills pulls back the curtain on an oft-ridiculed segment of society, the “soccer mom” (or dad!) and reveals the deeper recesses of the human psyche. The realization that to have a child is “the death of the self,” that some days the best you can do as a parent is “just be there,” and myriad other epiphanies. From Pre-Game to Post-Game, from “Aging” to “Zidane,” there are life lessons for player and parent.—Shaindel Beers, author of Secure Your Own Mask, Winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize ​
I am not sure I have encountered a writer who can so completely, and continuously, blindside me with a smack of emotion as Joseph Mills always does. Reading several of these stories, I was nodding along, thinking yep, yep, yep . . . and then WHOA. I found pieces of myself in so many of the parents, and so clearly identified other family members and people I know in some of the other characters. I love the connections between the stories and how he perfectly captures life as a parent. This is simply fantastic.—Jamie Rogers Southern, Bookmarks
Exit, Pursued by a Bear
What an inspired collection! The lines between reality and the stage, between life and art, between past and present—they're all blurred into an exciting whirligig of poetry based on Shakespeare's stage directions. You don't have to be a Shakespeare nut to fall in love with this collection, but these poems are sure to cast a spell that won't be easily broken by man or beast.… a wonderful piece of literature that should be studied along with Shakespeare's plays in English classes around the world
— Robert Lee Brewer, Solving the World’s Problems and editor of Poet’s Market
As a poet, Joseph Mills keeps a close eye on the ordinary, knowing that, at any moment, the extraordinary is bound to flash forth. And it’s that flashing forth that most people miss. Yet when they read about it in deceptively easy-to-understand terms, they immediately recognize a truth, a truth that they missed. But now that they have been awakened to the possibility of spotting it for themselves, they can go out there into their lives and look for it themselves.
— John P. O'Grady, Grave Goods and Pilgrims to the Wild
Angels, Thieves, and Winemakers
...it is a must-have for all wine lovers. No ideology here, just perspective. Mills has a keen sense for why wine is so improbably important to so many of us, and on page after page, the wine lover will say, "Oh yes, that's me."
— Dave McIntyre, Washington Post
A collection of revelations, truths to be found in and about wine. Witty, mordant, melancholy, funny, these bright poems fix and illumine the many moods we may encounter in a bottle of happy red.
— Former North Carolina Poet Laureate Fred Chappell
This Miraculous Turning
Winner of the Roaoke-Chowan Award for Poetry
Joseph Mills writes the best kind of poems about family. These are unsentimental, frank pieces that open from the private to the public, reminding us that we are more than parents and children, but are members of a world that we create and inhabit together. Beautifully crafted, sometimes humorous, and often heartbreaking, This Miraculous Turning is a poignant meditation on family, race, religion, and identity in modern America.
— Kelly Davio, author of Burn This House
Sending Christmas Cards to Huck and Hamlet
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I have been reading Joseph Mills’ work for years, but this, his fourth collection, is my favorite. Ultimately, his poems do what poetry should do: simplify the complicated and complicate the seemingly simple. You’ll never think of Rapunzel as a victim again.
— Lori Ostlund, author of After the Parade and The Bigness of the World
Love and Other Collisions
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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. 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
Somewhere During the Spin Cycle
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This is a great poetry of the blues--with their ordinary events and days played against the shock of grace. In Mills' poetry, simple, enormous things (a wife's hand touching the speaker as he sleeps, the torque of memory erupting through scents and voices) all hold a bright real light against the grating presence of death and dissolution. It is purely original, and (like the poet describing memory through a vintage of wine) has notes of Charles Wright and Pablo Neruda in its own particular savor.
- Jan Van Stavern, author of The Long Birth