Borderline Fortune

Penguin Poets

De: Teresa K. Miller, Carol Muske-Dukes

Narrado por: Teresa K. Miller

A collection that explores inherited trauma on an individual and communal level, from a National Poetry Series-winning poet who “refus[es] the mind’s limits” (Carol Muske-Dukes).

Borderline Fortune is a meditation on intangible family inheritance - of unresolved intergenerational conflicts and traumas in particular - set against the backdrop of our planetary inheritance as humans. As species go extinct and glaciers melt, Teresa K. Miller asks what we owe one another and what it means to echo one’s ancestors’ grief and fear. Drawing on her family history, from her great-grandfather’s experience as a schoolteacher on an island in the Bering Strait to her father’s untimely death, as well as her pursuit of regenerative horticulture, Miller seeks through these beautifully crafted poems to awaken from the intergenerational trance and bear witness to our current moment with clarity and attention.

©2021 Teresa K. Miller (P)2021 Penguin Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

“Miller will be a new and invigorating voice, fully conversant with the ambiguities of our present day.” —Library Journal

“I’m so impressed with this new book, with the condensation of syntax, the music, the interior rhyme and off-rhyme, echoey sequences, and the ethical and aesthetic insistence on a lack of resolution. I’m fascinated by the way the ‘you’ to whom so many of the poems are directed begins to take on aspects of a landscape. In fact, all through the book, the nonhuman and the human seem to be merging. W. S. Merwin implied that elegy is always written for someone who can’t read it, but Miller’s poems suggest that elegy is a modality that can conjure presence again and that the poem resurrects the dead in some sense.” —Forrest Gander, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, on Borderline Fortune at the Montana Book Festival

“Teresa K. Miller explores startling territories in Borderline Fortune. She addresses the lines we’ve drawn and erased for centuries on the earth—that conform to the borders we cross and uncross in the mind. Yet: ‘I’m asking you to believe in what you’ve never seen or heard,’ she writes, refusing the mind’s limits. Here is the dark power of climate change where she finds ‘the future all danger, heat, & scarcity.’ Blake, Dickinson, and Hopkins’ Terrible Sonnets hover (‘birds build—but not I build’), above trees cut down and hope with feathers. The damage done to the earth echoes the damages to the protean mind of the poet—but Miller remains radiantly elusive, an escape artist in these marvelous poems of altered terra firma and revelation.” —Carol Muske-Dukes, author of Blue Rose