Teresa K. Miller, poet and essayist

Borderline Fortune is starting to take shape as a full-fledged book, and I hope to have a cover to show you soon. In the meantime, I’m grateful for these kind words:

Teresa K. Miller explores startling territories in Borderline Fortune. She addresses the lines we’ve drawn and erased for centuries on the earth—that conform to the borders we cross and uncross in the mind. Yet: “I’m asking you to believe in what you’ve never seen or heard,” she writes, refusing the mind’s limits. Here is the dark power of climate change where she finds “the future all danger, heat, & scarcity.” Blake, Dickinson, and Hopkins’ Terrible Sonnets hover (“birds build—but not I build”), above trees cut down and hope with feathers. The damage done to the earth echoes the damages to the protean mind of the poet—but Miller remains radiantly elusive, an escape artist in these marvelous poems of altered terra firma and revelation.

—Carol Muske-Dukes, former California poet laureate and author of Blue Rose

In Borderline Fortune, Teresa K. Miller claws her way to and through her subject—loss in the form of “shrapnel and good intention.” Awareness: It’s a hard journey. The human voice calls in ragged gasps, how did we get here? But unlike Rumi who blithely says, “Whoever brought me here will have to take me home,” Miller’s voice has been dragged to this shore and pressed under. To write is to imagine, and Miller discovers in the going, in the moment when we remember that “every river had a first day to flow.” Through Miller’s poems, we are given that first day, no matter what comes after. We find hope for another way of being in the world.

—David Romtvedt, National Poetry Series–winning author of A Flower Whose Name I Do Not Know and Dilemmas of the Angels

In case you missed it, 8 Poems published another excerpt from the manuscript on New Year’s Eve. (Remember when we, or at least I, thought 2020 would magically end that night?)

I have a Goodreads page up now and invite you to add Borderline Fortune to your “Want to Read” list. You can also find me on Twitter and Facebook.

Stay safe, and get that vaccine when you can! I long to see people inside bookstores before the year is through.