Archive

“‘The essence of the cicada,’ Claire Millikin says, ‘is burial and ascension,’ which is also the essence of this stunning book, Magicicada. Grounded in the experience of a young teen’s solitary confinement (for truancy and silence, her only defense against violation), these poems draw on...

This extraordinary collection of deeply personal poetry contains poems of childhood, youth, and adulthood, set mostly in the southern United States. It is a book about reckoning with grief, about the beauty and brutality of life in America, about living in exile in one’s own...

Movies, haircuts, forests, backroads, pottery, photographs, jewelry, birds: the objects that make up and are discarded in the process of a life are the transient, mournfully held subjects of Transitional Objects. The book is bound as four booklets: Straight Line, Film, Fakes, and Vanishing Point,...

Poems that address the pain caused by gender stereotypes and racial oppression in the American South. Claire Millikin’s poetry collection, Dolls, stages a confrontation of gendered and racial oppression. Working through the motif of the doll, the poems interrogate femininity in the traditional culture of the South,...

"What does snow feel like, falling in the heart?… In poems as closely keyed, lucid, stark, and secretive as black and white photographs, Millikin explores the transgressive, hunger-whetted, half-wild places that house us and that we house.” -Lisa Russ Spaar Buy...

After Houses is an extended meditation on homelessness. In unflinching, raw poetry, poet Claire Millikin explores states of homelessness, and a longing for, even a devotion to, houses—houses as spaces where one could be safe and at ease. The poems move through an American landscape,...

Poetry. Claire Millikin's second full-length collection, Motels Where We Lived, explores the hopefulness and precariousness of youth. Precisely hewn but expansive, these poems take as their materials snowy winter evenings, modern art, the life of Greta Garbo, and more. The poet's sharpness of vision creates...

Tartessos and Other Cities is Claire Millikin’s second book of poetry with 2Leaf Press that continues to explore homelessness. In this collection, Millikin uses the sensitivity of poetry to express some of the emotions surrounded by homelessness and loss. Named for Tartessos, a lost city...

“In this remarkable collection, Claire Millikin has made her own persistent music of a fully felt, fully experienced life in which ‘what's broken never heals completely.’ Often edging into what seems unspeakable, she finds a language that remains plain, steady, scrupulous, unsentimental and unshowy. Poem...