Overtime

By Joseph Millar

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, Millar grounds his poems in the details and small mysteries of everyday life and labor. Whether the speaker is murmuring a song to the beloved in poems like "Love Pirates" or "Listener," imagining the travails of a Native American war chief in "Sitting Bull in Canada," or considering his own inevitable death in "Heart Attack," Millar tells a story plainly, moving from lyric to narrative and back again in language charged with duende and force. As Yusef Komunyakaa has written, "Millar is a poet we can believe."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 088748574X
• ISBN13: 9780887485749
• Release Date: September 2013
• Publisher: Carnegie-Mellon University Press
• Length: 72 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.4" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

My Copy Is Worn From Constant Re-Reading

When I'm not picking this book up again ( & again) as a source of inspiration, it rests on my shelf between Phillip Levine's _What_Work_Is_ and B.H. Fairchild's _The_Art_Of_The_Lathe_. It holds its own in that company as a solid, timeless book that both furthers and transcends the genre of poems about work.

Overtime is a hit

This book opened my eyes to the secret life of men. Camille Paglia, Philip Levine, Richard Hugo and Larry Levis would love this book. If you've ever worked, raised a child, been married or divorced, had a desperate love affair, drank too much, tried too hard, missed your father or read Keats out loud to the salt marches, this is the book for you. A great accomplishment by a wonderful new poet.