Is there a correct order that you can put distraction in? As in, going to a grocery store, with all the ordered boxes containing cereal and sandwich cookies and granola bars and boxed pasta and cartons of milk and egg cartons. All of them with shapes that are like the rectangles Miller includes in her poems. Almost like observing the shape is the experience of reading her poems. You can find them everywhere! Boxes that are sometimes punctuated, and sometimes they’re just obfuscating. Get out of the way rectangular boxes, I’m trying to read!
And I am trying my hardest to live a life on earth. Just like Miller has asked me to. I’d like to imagine the different spaces where you could draw an emotional cul-de-sac. Life on earth is standing in the kitchen washing dishes. There’s an emotional cul-de-sac inside you putting your favorite glass in the dish rack. Outside, there’s a man approaching a woman, and his life on earth hasn’t quite recognized whether a woman could have a similar life on earth like him. He might be estimating the life of the poet’s cat, Ramona, who can never really be addressed, to be equivalent to what the woman lives on earth. In a situation like this, it is useful for a woman to draw an emotional cul-de-sac around herself that’s built using the rectangular proportions of an iPhone or a cereal box. So it looks like the woman is protected by a force field from Asteroids, ca. 1984. Life on earth when contained in a proportional rectangle is, admit it, a crude construction. And, unfortunately, in this particular interaction between “man” and “woman” there is a force of the intruder’s that scatters that force field the woman has formed around her. Dear Nora Claire Miller, poet, I appreciate the emotional cul-de-sac in all the places it seems to appear in this book!
The key to understanding Nora Claire Miller is the building block, of course. So long as you recognize the rectangular proportions she’s proposing for the building block. But where most people would see the building block as something to build with, Miller’s book recognizes how many building blocks exist in this technological age that are just somewhere existing. The phone in your hand. The stackable containers at the grocery store. The thoughts in your head (though I would say the book’s main tension involves the more organic shapes thoughts take). Maybe all this is excessive. Commodity culture is. But Miller’s book accounting for the pervasive nature of commodities is not excessive.
Yes, outside Miller’s book, there might be opportunities to vacation to Rome, where lots of building blocks have been put to what are are now considered historic uses. Miller’s book, however, has adeptly collected the building blocks she’d discovered around her text while she was writing. And now she’s published them among her poems. And the whole experience makes for very pleasant proportions. Like at the grocery store, would Nora Claire Miller say that all those perfectly shelved boxes are distracting or absorbing? What is life on earth when populated with so many singularities?
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.