Only someone who has a deep capacity to love and enjoy the music of life could have written these wonderful, troubling poems. There's a tenderness at the core of Fortune, where the commonplace becomes atypical and fantastical, a nd eazch poem possesses a voice that summons and reveals. Joseph Millar is a poet we can believe.--Yusuf Komunyakaa, winner of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for poetry "If you want the real news of how America lives, of what it's like to be here with us, Millar will tell you with exactitude and delicacy in poems like none you've read before. He know a country, an America,...

Overtime, Joseph Millar's first book of poetry, both traditionally elegiac and formally unexpected--aims at the overlap between art and the everyday grind of work and single fatherhood. Here we find poems of loss and grief, alongside poems of working-class celebration that hum with the sound of wind in the ladder racks and miles of telephone wire. Overtime is a book of poetry whose chief concern is not art for its own sake but rather the artistic visions the everyday struggles of life provide when paid the right attention. A poet deeply sunk into William Carlos Williams' American Grain,...