Who Is Trixie the Trasher? and Other Questions

Jane Miller

In her eleventh collection, Jane Miller illuminates a dark era with humor, formal interrogation, and tenderness. Who Is Trixie the Trasher? and Other Questions is a hyper-political and yet personal collection. Here Miller’s signature lyric voice is charged with a new sense of urgency as poems run—sprint—through headlines and futuristic visions, towards desire and refusal, empathy and accountability. Intimate language addresses our collective trauma—especially, but not exclusively, as experienced by women—where human dignity collides with the reality of power and privilege. Beginning with the collection’s title, Who Is Trixie the Trasher? delivers a relentless litany of questions and juxtapositions, some answerable and some slippery as riddles. What becomes of the female body as time goes by? What is poetry for in the face of fascism? How is it that love shows up, anyway?

Paperback: $16.00 list price

Bookshop Amazon
Receive this book as a gift when you donate.

ISBN: 9781556595400

Format: Paperback

Playlist Available:

Whether the Goat Is a Metaphor

We go on talking and digging a pit in the earth
to spit-roast kid,
since anyone working in a lively rhythm is not attached
to the story.
In saving her, he saves himself.
It’s getting late.
The story of the boy is that
by drinking water from a hoof, he’s turned into a goat.
If we separate magic from life,
we get art. His sister, long story short,
gets thrown into a river with a stone around her neck.
His weeping stirs the neighbors with a silken net
to scoop her out. He turns three somersaults
of joy and lands on two feet as a boy again.
How, in heaven’s name, will dinner be served, and when?
Separate art from life, we get nothing.
We go on talking and digging.
I’ve got a million and ten things to do.
Of the multitude of things, it is emptiness
that’s necessary now, now that you’ve had time
to wash and dress. As a form
of enlightenment, the most unsuspecting guest
is your enemy in armor, or invisible,
who will clap you on the back
when you choke on a bone at the banquet.

About the Author

Jane Miller has written twelve books, most recently Who Is Trixie the Trasher? and Other Questions, and including Working Time: Essays on Poetry, Culture, and Travel. She has performed her creative work and lectured on literature and the fine arts at universities, colleges, libraries, community centers, and public arts venues for over thirty years. She is the recipient of a Wallace Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Western States Book Award, and the Audre …

Read more

Reviews

“Miller’s writing is brassy but earnest, and she suffuses her approach to fraught social politics with humor and exuberant interest in people.” —Publishers Weekly

“Her lusher effusions gain astringency from an achingly palpable heartbreak, and from an increased awareness of technology, commodity, politics: swoon meets zoom.” ―Boston Review

“Jane Miller is by far one of our best poets writing today… Miller is like the NASA space station of poetry: out of this world, yet of it, and still looking down. From her peculiar and important vantage she blows us kisses in the form of images that hit their mark.” ―Lambda Book Report

“An absorbing performance of art taken to the brink… All of its parts contribute to a gestalt of living, loving and losing in a reel of feeling that nonetheless attains a bracing lucidity. This is an incandescent text.” –C.D. Wright

“Book by book, Jane Miller has evolved a mode, a voice, a palette and landscape entirely her own… a composition of multiple planes and reflections that appears to emerge out of itself, true to laws of its own nature, and yet is disturbingly recognizable, continuously suggestive, intimate and beautiful.” ―W.S. Merwin

“A marvelously penetrating, synoptic poet, her best moments sublimely diagnostic.” ―Threepenny Review