Books

Ceremonial

Full-length manuscript chosen by Carl Phillips as the winner of the 2017 Orison Poetry Prize
Long-listed for the Foreword Indies Award and Julie Suk Award from Jacar Press

Listen/watch me read my poem, “Ceremonial Psalm,” for Ours Poetica
Interview about Ceremonial for Rob McLennan's 12 or 20
Video interview with L.A. Grove for Poetry.LA’s “A Poem By…” Series

"The current of language swept me up and carried me with seductive grace. I found myself rereading phrases, sentences, and entire poems, eager to experience again how the words were strung together." - Lauren Kane, staff pick for The Paris Review

"Miller’s book is a strange testament, teeming with some of the most original poems you’ll encounter this year." - review by Nick Ripatrazone for The Millions

“In her luscious debut, […] [Miller] conjures powerful images of refusal to be confined by societal expectations of womanhood. On display is an inner life marked by the active embrace of both victories and defeats garnered in the face of defiance of others’ demands. […] In the process of discovering the self, Miller cuts a new path through an old wood.” - review by Publisher’s Weekly

"Miller is not afraid. She molds the human condition with myth and magic." - review by Grace Cavalieri for The Washington Independent Review of Books

“Reading her, I felt the kind of relief that comes from confessing a long-held secret to a new friend, one who understands.” - Corinne Segal, staff pick for Lit Hub

“Carly Joy Miller’s debut collection is sustenance that creates its own hunger.” - review by C.T. Salazar for The EcoTheo Review

"[F]or all their terrifying intensity, their clear and valid claim to the land of spiritual wrestling, [these] are also poems that delight. […] [A] deep, dark, glorious book." - review by Maggie Blake Bailey for Poetry International

"Carly Joy Miller is relentless. She doesn’t want you to breathe normally." - review by Matt Sutherland for Foreword Reviews

“Yet, even with the ungraspable quality of questions Miller’s poems ask, her ceremonies helped me think more clearly about how the language I speak, hear, read, and write all remains in kinship with my body, my past, and my imagination.” - review by Jeremy Michael Reed for Grist Journal

"Ceremonial is a feast where human made beasts made spirits come to cavort. Everything is a verb—nothing stands still in this document of strangeness and healing. One can only surrender to the raw power of Miller’s music." - review by Logan February for Wildness

“… this collection will be one that will leave its readers in a post-dream haze, revisiting lines time and time again to find the hidden metaphors, and to satiate their own poetic restlessness.” - review by Valorie K. Ruiz for Empty Mirror

"Her poems are restless, moving through myth and mantra, fable and consequence, seeking out the closest thing to truth that might be possible." - review by Rob McLennan

"The poems whisper; they shout; they remain silent for a moment, only to explode at the next moment." - review by Rajesh Subramanian for Modern Literature

Like a Beast

Chapbook chosen by Rick Campbell as the winner of the 2016 Rick Campbell Chapbook Prize.

Interview about Like a Beast at Speaking of Marvels

“Through ontological inquiry and formal contiguity, these poems try to track their own scent, turning in circles with the recursive logic undergirding Derrida’s je suis (I am [following]).” - review by Kristin George Bagnadov for Jacket2

"Miller’s skilled employment of sound heightens the tension strung through so many of these poems." - review by Tyler Robert Sheldon for The Los Angeles Review

"Bestiary-inspired, Like a Beast rips through mannered narrative and guts postured syntax and grammatical law; Like a Beast bites down to a visceral, emotional core that lies beneath the civilized logic that envelopes even the would-be ‘wildest’ poems. Like a Beast begs you follow it, then hunts you back." - review by MK Foster for Black Warrior Review

"Feral and indignant, each poem in Carly Joy Miller’s Like a Beast is like a small tamed beast: wild inside, but bridled." - review by Anita Olivia Koester for Fork and Page

"Her language is feral and gorgeous, and the way she manipulates sentence structure is everything that you would want out of poetry." - review by Gina Vaynshetyn for Hello Giggles, listed as one of her 27 Best Books of 2017