Description:
Carnaval is an astonishingly beautiful poetry collection that follows a young woman as she moves away from the life she once imagined into one shaped by travel, art, and mystery.
Review Quotes:
What a consummate poet Susan L. Miller is. The poems in Carnaval allow their own grounding in the specificity and physicality of body and place to open into the dark and bright interiors of loss, discovery, and recognition. Through the dark passages, a fugitive shine, the "light / that this life affords" a seven-day candle guttering, "one morning silvering." And present here too, is a light that can't be seen ("Obviously you can't see / the wings on your back") but which swings and pulses in the music of Miller's lines. Get ready: you will meet in these poems "a mind that turns this world / over and over, cultivating it / until something blooms so suddenly / it overtakes the garden." Or put it this way: "she's seen / the silvered back of everything." And lucky, lucky us: reading these poems, we do too.
-Jean Gallagher, author of Rivermouth Shouting
Susan Miller's Carnaval is a festival of flora and fauna, color and language. Her poems transform the everyday, the mundane, into the wonderful, the worthy. Traversing between her (at least) two worlds, Miller's poetry records a way of seeing, her voracious ojo the bridge between who and where she is and who and where she remembers being.
-Evie Shockley, author of suddenly we