“Chloe Yelena Miller’s Perforated offers us intimate, confiding poems that ask us to lean closer. ‘Can you keep a secret’ the poems say. This is a book of lost friendships and lost loves, the world an “Ever rotating exhibit of light and dark,” the regrets we have decades later over “what can go wrong / without the right words.” Throughout, the speaker—always a mother who fears the future—worries about English vocabulary and newly learned Italian phrases, as if learning language might teach us to mourn more easily this difficult present or help us to find, at last, a place we might call home.“
– Jehanne Dubrow
News Since Your Passing
Your father remarried
after the divorce,
your mother writes to me.
And I miscarried,
tried not to believe
that baby was you.
I knew you wanted to come back.
Have you?
About Chloe Yelena Miller
Chloe Yelena Miller is a writer and teacher living in Washington, D.C., with her partner and child. Perforated is her second full-length poetry collection. She’s also the author of the poetry collection Viable (Lily Poetry Review Books 2021) and the poetry chapbook Unrest (Finishing Line Press 2013). She and Shasta Grant co-founded and co-direct Brown Bag Lit, an online writing community. She also teaches writing and literature through University of Maryland’s Global Campus, Politics and Prose bookstore and New Directions in Writing, as well as privately. Miller has a BA in Italian language and literature from Smith College (1998) and an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College (2003). http://www.chloeyelenamiller.com
Photograph credit: Hans Noel