Books
Wipe Your Collar Clean: A Look at Joe Millar’s Most Recent Book of Poetry, Blue Rust
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by Kari Smith
5 acorns
“I like the engine roaring to life, a savage
red dogwood shedding its flowers
over the sidewalk, over the fence. I like your hat with its purple feather,
cheap as melody, cheap as a wish.”
If you don’t know the name Joseph Millar, Google it, learn it, remember it. He’s a North Carolina poet (and recently named Guggenheim fellow) reading in your local bookstores, writers’ houses and literary festivals. He’s a voice asking to be heard among the chinks and clanks of America’s working-class landscapes; paying homage to the people, poets, objects and culture that populate his past, that have shaped his experience. He has been called a working-class poet, a poet of the people, a voice of our times.
