Joseph Mills

The Holiday Cycle
Joe Mills is the bard of epiphany: the ongoing, often imperceptible, even overlooked, glorious and mundane rote offices of the living. In his latest volume, The Holiday Cycle, he delivers one remarkable poem after another as he has over the years since his marvelous debut collection. Mills sees through the gauze in which each day shrouds: ritual and commemoration, superstition and regret, love and thwarted love. He “[loads] every rift with ore” in precise language sonically pitched to illuminate: “how joy can arrive unexpectedly, / how pleasure has its dangers, how love can be difficult / to forecast, its accumulation clear only in retrospect.” A beautiful, poignant book.

—Joseph Bathanti, 

North Carolina Poet Laureate & author of Land of Amnesia

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In this almanac of poems, Joseph Mills celebrates the high points of a year, with

family and friends, each day enhanced by memory and associations. The reader

feels privileged to share a poetic calendar ranging from sonnets to pantoum to

longer narratives and meditations, spoken in an irresistible voice, often with humor,

sometimes elegiac, confessional, with moments of epiphany, always with love.

—Robert Morgan, author of Dark Energy