Description
Author: Brenda Miller, Winner of the 2020 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award
Year: 2020
ISBN: 978-1-930446-54-0
Pages: 48
The Daughters of Eldery Women by Brenda Miller occupies the liminal space between growing up and growing old, shock and aftershock. With the repeated titles of her poems functioning as a mantra, Miller inhabits a narrative mindfulness, focusing on the maturing relationship between daughter and mother. She explores “what happens to a body / when you make it hold on // beyond its expiration date.” These poems speak to the quiet suffering of the human condition in “voices soft / as they’ll ever be” but ultimately it is “this grief before grief” that reminds us we only mourn what is loved.
Some books help us escape; Miller’s book keeps us wholly present.
*Note: If you submitted to the 2020 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Competition, you will receive copies of both of this year’s books when they are released.
Brenda Miller is the author of five
essay collections, including An Earlier Life (Ovenbird Books, 2016), which received the Washington State Book Award for Memoir. She also coauthored Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining and Publishing Creative Nonfiction (third edition published 2019) and The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World. Her collaborative collection with Julie Marie Wade, Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, was selected by Hanif Abduraqib as the winner of the Cleveland State University Press Nonfiction Book Award in 2019, and the book is forthcoming from CSU Press in 2021. Brenda’s collection of writing on writing, A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form, is forthcoming from University of Michigan Press in 2021. Brenda’s work has received six Pushcart Prizes. She is a professor of English at Western Washington University and associate faculty at the Rainier Writing Workshop. Her website is www.brendamillerwriter.com.
