Pursuit of Happiness

By Jane Miller

Jane Miller's searching new poems ask what beauty, love, and art can still offer in an era shaped by uncertainty and loss.

These poems search through language for a way to live without losing the ability to recognize the beautiful and the true. They seek to affirm the lyric voice--the voice of a living person--as a way of remaining present amid the crises that define contemporary life.

Each poem is an investigation into happiness and, by extension, beauty and love. At a deeper level, the collection asks about the function of art itself: Can art sustain the human spirit? Does it truly serve reality? These are the questions that haunt The Elusive Pursuit of Happiness.

The poems move through ancient Greece and Rome, modern France, the American West, ancient China, and the Middle East. As intimate communication comes under attack from technology, weariness, evil, and, ultimately, death, poetry affirms the instinct to survive and to refuse erasure. These poems neither rush nor linger, but instead inhabit language in its fullest, most spirited nature.

The imagination is not an escape from reality but a force that helps us engage it, even as we are burdened by place and troubled by the task of keeping the planet safe. If we are fortunate, we are sustained by friendship and intimacy, even as we remain in continual states of mourning and care. How near--and how far--our happiness can seem in an age when our history and our future feel frightfully close.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1556597436
• ISBN13: 9781556597435
• Release Date: May 2027
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press