Jane Miller

"Book by book, Jane Miller has evolved a mode, a voice, a palette and landscape entirely her own. If she were a painter, one might describe it as a descendant of cubism, a composition of multiple planes and reflections that appears to emerge out of itself, true to laws of its own nature, and yet is disturbingly recognizable, continuously suggestive, intimate and beautiful. Her subject is love and illusion and their revelation about each other."--W. S. Merwin "Reading Jane Miller's poetry is like channel-surfing on acid."--L.A. Weekly Jane Miller is a traveler stimulated by ideas beyond our immediate sphere. In this book-length sequence animated and propelled by a confrontation with her dead father, she meditates on home, love, war and the responsibility of the poet. A Palace of Pearls is inspired by one of the most spectacular civilizations in history, the Arab kingdom of Al-Andalus--a Middle Age civilization where architecture, science and art flourished and Christians, Jews and Muslims lived in relative harmony. The reader roams through "rooms," encountering Greek, Judaic and Roman mythology, and through the streets of fifteenth-century Spain and contemporary Rome in Miller's most personal and associative volume. From A Palace of Pearls We bow our heads for the ancient draping of the gardenia lei in the hotel lobby and are relieved of our possessions as per a reminder that one must enter Paradise a little naked Jane Miller is the author of eight previous books of poetry and essays. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award. She lives in Tucson and teaches in the creative writing program at The University of Arizona, having served as the program's director from 1999-2003.

A Palace of Pearls

In her eleventh collection, Jane Miller illuminates a dark era with humor, formal interrogation, and tenderness. Who Is Trixie the Trasher? and Other Questions is a hyper-political and yet personal collection. Here Miller’s signature lyric voice is charged with a new sense of urgency as poems run—sprint—through headlines and futuristic visions, towards desire and refusal, empathy and accountability. Intimate language addresses our collective trauma—especially, but not exclusively, as experienced by women—where human dignity collides with the reality of power and privilege. Beginning with the collection’s title, Who Is Trixie the Trasher? delivers a relentless litany of questions and juxtapositions, some answerable and some slippery as riddles. What becomes of the female body as time goes by? What is poetry for in the face of fascism? How is it that love shows up, anyway?

Who Is Trixie the Trasher? and Other Questions

Miller redefines poetry to accommodate a richly complex lyric style. Intelligent, lush and visionary, her poems have been described as the poetic equivalents of the paintings of Jackson Pollock or Jasper Johns. Miller’s poetry is ultra modern, mixing elements of pop culture with high art, sexuality with intellectual investigation, complexity with brilliant lucidity. Japan’s master print artist Andō Hiroshige immortalized scenes in all weather, seasons, and times of day along the Tokaido, the “Eastern Sea Road.” By way of Hiroshige, Miller views the joyous details and difficulties of innkeepers, cooks, porters, wrestlers, and men and women of the pleasure quarter of another age.

Wherever You Lay Your Head

Winner of the Western States Book Award in poetry. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

August Zero

A herald of desire, mortality, and the mission of poetry itself, Jane Miller’s Paper Banners catalogs the intimate experiences that create a life, hoping that “what will survive of us is love.” A herald of desire, suffering, mortality, and the mission of poetry itself, Jane Miller’s Paper Banners “say the cosmos/ isn’t hostile/ yet strangles a dove /with one hand.” Against this angst, Miller steps outside of history to contemplate voices of love, aging, and artmaking. Many poems are addressed to family members, friends, and young poets, or pay homage to familiar figures taken by time or tragedy, including Virginia Woolf, Osip Mandelstam, and the Song Dynasty poet Li Qingzhao. In clear, short lines, these poems harken to ancient banderoles, or pennants, which announced rallying cries on the lances of knights and mottoes on the flags of ships. Here, Miller’s Paper Banners are made of images of the American Southwest and scrutinize its political and physical landscape. Like skywriting streamed in white smoke, this collection bears its message on the wind, its words addressed to anyone. As Miller catalogs the intimate experiences that make up a life—friendships, loves, dreams, our human connection to the environment—Paper Banners becomes a hope that “what will survive of us is love.”

Paper Banners

“Book by book, Jane miller has evolved a mode, a voice . . . entirely her own.”—M.S. Merwin

Thunderbird

Shares stories of psychiatric service dogs and the work they do, explains which dogs are the right candidates for the job, looks at how the dogs are trained, and includes a list of resources for additional information.

Ordinary Dogs and Their Extraordinary Power to Transform Lives

Healing Companions

A new & selected collection providing a comprehensive overview of an inventve, daring, and insightful lyric poet.

New and Selected Poems

Memory at These Speeds

"What's important to you in your career? What does success mean to you? What is your top and how in the world do you get there? If you are asking these questions, Sleep Your Way to the Top (And Other Myths About Business Success) is your book. THE girlfriend's go-to guide to making it to the top without having to sleep your way there, Sleep Your Way to the Top is a manual, a mentor, a friend you can count on to help you figure out whether to be a bitch or a flirt, how much to drink at the holiday party, and what to do when you get an x-rated email from the VP. This book will hold your hand through resume writing, acing the interview for your dream job, asking for the promotion, learning to love the job you hate, telling your boss to shove it (or not), and having a friend with benefits at work. Here is your road map through all those difficult situations from female bosses that remind you of Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada to feeling like your voice is not being heard to deciding if you should sleep with him! Most of all, this book is about a better you, allowing you to capture your own power and reach your highest potential. It is about YOU creating YOUR path to success"--Author's website.

And Other Myths about Business Success

Sleep Your Way to the TOP

"American Odalisque is Jane Miller's third major collection of poems and establishes her as one of the most original and crucial poets of her generation. Whether the mode is personal, sentimental, or transcendental, Miller is a lyric poet exploring cultural context, breaking up the narrative into sudden metaphoric juxtapositions, utilizing rhetorical concerns to illustrate levels of cognition and dissociation. But like the best lyric poets, she is a poet of love and hope who expresses a tenderness that is quintessentially American. Her language is constantly evolving--sometimes idiomatically conversational, sometimes approaching a high formal style. Story or plot are not the point: her poems cannot be summarized or paraphrased. Working in a tradition that reaches all the way from Sappho to oral cultures of North America, Miller finds the truth of the poem inextricably bound to its musical expression"--Back cover

Poems

American Odalisque

Behind the familiar image of the woman teacher lies a curiously neglected history. In this book the author weaves her own story through a provocative history that culminates in a look at current debates surrounding education.

School for Women

Bilingualism, Culture, and Education

Many Voices

"One of the deadliest of seductions for feminists is their seduction by theorists, by theories". With this boldly polemical stroke, Jane Miller begins her exploration stealthily, cumulatively, and with a deft and compelling intelligence. In looking at the complex relation of women to culture and literature, and to theory and politics, and in recalling her own coming to feminism, she asks how women experience themselves within ideas and traditions which simultaneously include and exclude them, take their presence for granted, and deny it. Seduction as a category binds together the ambivalence--the pleasure and the invisible coercions--of male/female relations, while at the same time transgressing the implicit imperative in patriarchal societies to confine eroticism and its politics to the closet. Seductions consists of five loosely connected, almost autonomous chapters, which nevertheless trace a historical progression from the eighteenth century to the present. Miller borrows Antonio Gramsci's idea of "hegemony", using it to contextualize her readings of two famous literary seductions, as told through Richardson's Clarissa and Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. The second chapter focuses on Raymond Williams' novels and criticism, using them to chart the larger exclusions of feminism by Marxism. The author enlists Carolyn Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman in an attempt to survey Williams' telling silences. The third chapter reconstructs and analyzes the life and career of Clara Collet, Miller's great-aunt, close friend of George Gissing, civil servant, and expert on women's education and work. Through Collet, Miller bestows individual color on the pressures inflicted onprofessional women to assume male perspectives and procedures. The fourth chapter is superb. Bracketed by discussions of Charlotte Bronte's Villette and Toni Morrison's Beloved, it questions influential treatments of colonialism and orientalism which use women as a metaphor without listening for the testimony of real women. It is a moving plea to set the category of "women" alongside more privileged categories of class and race. The final chapter counterpoints the internal contradictions in the "polyphonic" theories of Bakhtin and Volosinov with an account of women's distrust of other women in Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye. By ending with an evocation of women's self-dislike, Miller emphasizes the chilling ways in which cultural exclusions and degradations of women are internalized and replicated by complicitous victims.

Studies in Reading and Culture

Seductions

Kore Press

From A Palace of Pearls

Jane Miller, CEO and founder of JaneKnows.com, a career advice website, has spent three decades in the corporate world in executive positions at PepsiCo, Heinz, Hostess and Bestfoods. Now, she's written a how-to for millennials wanting to make it to the top. This is a sassy, substantial read, headlined with myths (Size Doesn't Matter/You Can Sleep Your Way to the Top); punctuated by devilish text boxes ("let's walk out now and get drunk on morning martinis"); and containing end of chapter Mirror Mirrors to help the reader develop the roadmap to their "top." Sleep Your Way to the Top is the go-to guide for grads, pre-grads and new execs, showing us where it's easy to get tripped up, who might trick us and how to make it past the pitfalls on our way to the corner office.

Sleep Your Way to the Top

Poet Jane Miller collaborates with artist Beverly Pepper on a highly personal journey through the debris of the poet’s crumbling relationship, and her mother’s descent into illness. Beautifully rendered poems and short chapters of poetic prose combine with Pepper’s chalk and oil drawings to form an intimate and unique meditation on the nature of love, of heartache, of the many midnights we, each and every one of us, live through and carry with us through our lives. “The goal is not to make sense of, but art of this story,” writes poet C.D. Wright in her introduction. “The goal is not to make a story but to experience the whole mess. There are mental sufferings and physical sufferings to go through; to apprehend if one can. There are the spent casings of history to sift through, pick up and examine. Calm-like, hysterical, forensic. This life not just a worn passage.” In the end, the light shines through Miller’s midnights and the rewards of passing through the darkness with her are countless.

Jane Miller

Books

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