Joseph Mills
Praise for Bodies in Motion
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Bodies in Motion roves the sprawling terrain of the body and its adventures in wonder, love, boredom, misfortune, and mortality. Painting dance as a multiplicity of actions and longings, beginning with a small detail, an expression of the everyday, only to reveal something about the quirks of the universe. Overall, Mills offers the reader a roadmap by which to consider their own lives in movement: where they’ve been, where they are, and why every life lived dancing is one worth talking about.
—Cara Hagan, artist/scholar
Bodies in Motion is connected by poems about dance but artfully twirls between characters doing the funky chicken in the kitchen to dancing The Nutcracker on stage to a gym packed with shuffling adolescents. It steps back and forth in time with the movements of black holes in the universe, George Washington, Charles Dickens, wedding receptions, parents and their families, dance classes, Hollywood musicals, and more. Regardless of how many left feet you may have, you’ll enjoy the show.
—Matt Mason, Nebraska State Poet and author of I Have a Poem the Size of the Moon
Praise for Bleachers
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In Bleachers, Joe Mills pulls back the curtain on an oft-ridiculed segment of society, the “soccer mom” (or dad!) and reveals the deeper recesses of the human psyche. The realization that to have a child is “the death of the self,” that some days the best you can do as a parent is “just be there,” and myriad other epiphanies. From Pre-Game to Post-Game, from “Aging” to “Zidane,” there are life lessons for player and parent.
—Shaindel Beers, author of Secure Your Own Mask, Winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize
I am not sure I have encountered a writer who can so completely, and continuously, blindside me with a smack of emotion as Joseph Mills always does. Reading several of these stories, I was nodding along, thinking yep, yep, yep . . . and then WHOA. I found pieces of myself in so many of the parents, and so clearly identified other family members and people I know in some of the other characters. I love the connections between the stories and how he perfectly captures life as a parent. This is simply fantastic.
—Jamie Rogers Southern, Bookmarks