Praise for Into the Bardo
Jim Miller’s Into the Bardo reminds us that everything is “tentative and precious.” After experiencing a harrowing summer of several near-death experiences, it was poetry that Miller summoned, to bear witness to what he learned on this journey. In these poems, readers navigate the sometimes-precarious waters between wakefulness and sleep, life and death, treading in the liminal spaces of uncertainty. In fact, it was the great Roman poets, Virgil and Ovid, who taught us, Somnus, the god of sleep, was indeed the brother of Death. It is in this nexus where we find Miller revisiting memories of family and friends, the marvels of travel, the percipience of the arts, and ultimately, his musings on the “interconnectedness of all,” especially as he beckons us to confront the economic and health care disparities that so many still endure. Miller reexamines a life lived while all along urging us to “feel the multi-grained texture of life / as it flows on ceaselessly / past even death.” Into the Bardo is full of wonder and wisdom.
—Manuel Paul López, Nerve Curriculum
Into the Bardo plumbs the caesura between life and death with all the attendant fear, love, wonder and insight. Miller makes the case that this is the space where we are most fully alive. A lover’s whispers and her bright green eyes, each of them “in their own separate hells” yet “blissfully, / in the arms of a love/beyond desire.” The interconnectedness between ancestors and his living son: “look at your hand and I’ll be there, always.” Most striking about this collection is the self / soul’s tremendous elasticity, contracting with interior suffering and then expanding to an “I am large, I contain multitudes”: crowing roosters, palm trees, ballfields, picket lines, shelves of books, crowds of beautiful strangers, gorgeous monsters of cities, rabbits at dawn, stars. That living and dying is as beautiful and unpredictable as improvisational jazz: “I am not my dying . . . Nor am I triumphant, transcendent, or absurd — / just all these things / running together in the flux.”
—Kendra Tanacea, The Alchemy of Us
About the Author
Jim Miller is a native San Diegan and a graduate of the MFA program at San Diego State University. In addition to his MFA in Fiction, he has a Ph.D. in American Culture Studies from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He teaches English, Humanities, and Labor Studies at San Diego City College and lives in San Diego with his wife, Kelly Mayhew, and son, Walter.
Miller is the author of the poetry collection Paradise and Other Lost Places (City Works Press, 2024), and his novels include Last Days in Ocean Beach (SD City Works Press, 2018), Flash (AK Press, 2010), and Drift (University of Oklahoma Press, 2007 and 2024). He is also co-author of a history of San Diego, Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See (with Mike Davis and Kelly Mayhew, The New Press, 2003 and 2005), and a cultural studies book on working class sports fandom, Better to Reign in Hell: Inside the Raiders Fan Empire (with Kelly Mayhew, The New Press, 2005).
In addition to this he is the editor of Sunshine/Noir: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana (City Works Press, 2005), Sunshine/Noir II: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana (with Kelly Mayhew, City Works Press, 2015), and Democracy in Education; Education for Democracy (AFT 1931, 2007). He has published poetry, fiction, and non-fiction in a wide range of journals and other publications, and, along with Kelly Mayhew and Doug Porter, has a Substack journal called The Jumping-Off Place as well as a weekly column in the blog Words and Deeds, a monthly column in the San Diego Union-Tribune’s “Community Voices Project,” and he previously wrote for the San Diego Free Press and the OB Rag.
Paperback: 66 pages
Publisher: Kelsay Books (September 18, 2024)
Also available on Kindle