Nightlight

Nightlight (Unicorn Press 2026) is a summoning of ghosts, speaking back to the inheritance of America’s deep South. In Nightlight, Claire Millikin invokes histories of cultural and personal wounds, placing them in conversation, illuminating the political struggles of contemporary America through remembering and recasting its past.

“Claire Millikin’s Nightlight is a haunting that echoes back into the past and stretches down towards Virginia and Georgia. The poems in this collection rustle up ghosts in landscapes and interiors, giving voice and shape to historical traumas, personal and collective. Millikin weaves together histories and that are also secrets, seamlessly stitching them in the voices of her childhood and her family. Nightlight is a tapestry of interwoven lineages of racism, southern whiteness, the horrors of American slavery and genocide of the Mvskoke people, and the devastation of gender-based violence. This collection is painful, yes, but it is also full up with resonant truth. ”
SAMAA ABDURRAQIB, author of Towards A Retreat

“In Nightlight, Claire Millikin writes from inside the American South, where collective history and personal pain are inseparable. Here, Confederate memory surfaces as daily encounter: the comfort of monuments, the honor of violence, and pastoral landscapes that cannot be swept away. These poems understand the South as a place built on secrets, where we hope to see clearly through a dirty mirror even as history insists on another truth. Refusing nostalgia or easy absolution, this collection offers an honest reckoning with what has been buried, misnamed, or passed down intact. Millikin reminds us what it means to love the places that taught us to look away. These poems do not offer rescue; instead, they lead us purposefully into the red clay dark and promise to leave the light on.”
ASHLEY LUMPKIN, author of The Sad Stays

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From New England Literary News

The Gothic basement of America – Nina MacLaughlin

This country moves in an uncertain sleepwalk, in the fugue that pulls a curtain between a person and what’s intolerable. Maine-based poet Claire Millikin travels in this place, awake to the nightmare of knowing “what you’ve been offered / as a guiding light / is worse than darkness.” Her new collection, Nightlight (Unicorn), pulls open the curtain, shedding weary light on her upbringing in the South, “the Gothic basement of America,” on Sally Hemings, the woman Thomas Jefferson enslaved and began having sex with when she was fourteen years old, Edgar Allen Poe’s child bride, age thirteen (“how it must have hurt”), of the Mvskoke who lived for millennia in Georgia, where Millikin’s family “has lived on their land for centuries, / which makes me the seed of thieves.” Spoken and unspoken, one hears the cautioning, “better not to think of it,” a refrain that has so corrupted the soul fiber of this country. In all her work, Millikin reveals the ruptures, the transgressions, the scars in the soil, in the flesh, in the pink grey majesty of the mind, and reminds us here, “You cannot choose what you inherit.”

From Booklife

In Nightlight, Claire Millikin explores her deep Southern roots—‘a buried stream dangerous and nourishing.’ While she honors those roots, she also grieves the fact that the soil they were planted in belonged to others who were driven out, thus leaving her ‘a thief’s inheritance.’ She uses a series of epigraphs, from Thomas Jefferson to Berry Gordy, to widen the cultural context of the poems. But it’s the poems themselves that make the textures palpable, make the pines, the voices, the cruelties and ghosts so compelling. Shifting between personal and historical lenses, the poems reckon with the sexual and racial violence embedded in Southern culture. If grief’s work includes ‘picking up spare wreckage,’ these poems make that work profound and luminous.

Booklife Reviews

“I want to begin again but I’m made of the South,” declares Georgia-born art history professor Millikin in this gorgeous, heartsick poetry collection, her eleventh, following Magiciada and others. For the speaker in Nightlight, efforts at renewal are continually interrupted and altered by remembering and recovering in the South. “In the backyard,” she writes, “I’d dig down to where mud was clay, […] excavating what […] mothers would never confess.” That evokes pasts both personal and political, suggesting the triumphs and atrocities of American history, each blood-soaked. From verse to verse, Millikin asks, “But where does it come from, my permission to stay here in America?”

That has been a timeless inquiry for Americans across generations, and Millikin both asks the question and answers it by way of an examination of a somber childhood beneath the Georgia sunshine. Especially compelling is her confrontation with the South’s legacy. She writes, “there’s no shortcut across broken glass,” and “you cannot choose what you inherit,” but also that “language can grow pure, even now.” Through language, Millikin finds an opportunity for transformation; to “walk away into another language” is to survive, and here poetry becomes a means to make something out of ruins. “Architect,” she writes, “build your house of indirect light, and it will be alright even in this broken world.”

Underlying Millikin’s collection, like the foundation of a home, is grief. In a poem about the loss of a parent, Millikin writes, “she was born in the yellow house that became a bank. I’m a stranger everywhere but there”; it is as if the nucleus of that grief is the only place where the speaker of this pained, relatable collection feels whole. Every selection in Nightlight offers substantive, reflective wisdom on what it is to be an American today. Millikin’s insights are clear-eyed and sometimes stinging—“chivalry accounts for many if not most of the broken bodies in the South”—as she demonstrates that, by facing truths and putting them into language, the inheritors of America can be made “honorable.”

Takeaway: Gorgeous, heartsick poetry examining Southern and American legacies.

Great for fans of: Jericho Brown’s “Duplex” and Rita Dove’s “I Have Been a Stranger in a Strange Land.”

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