I can’t trust heart valves
and breast tissue,
only what I can do
or make with my hands.
~excerpt from the poem “Everything”
For years, I’ve encouraged prose writing students to read poetry. Poems offer opportunities for piercing through the chaos of existence to excavate and distill what is vital for living. Poetry demands focus, clarity, and truth. Under the shadow of each new appalling or depressing news headline that now dominates our lives, the writing and reading of poetry become acts of resistance. It’s difficult to not feel as though we can no longer trust what we’re being told, but we can trust what we make with our hands. What we make with our hands offers agency and hope.
Perforated, Chloe Yelena Miller’s second full-length poetry collection — released this month from Lily Poetry Review Books — traces the ache of grief, the fear that erupts from motherhood, and the profundity of creating and experiencing art. Unearthing moments of both personal and collective loss, from Italy to the US, Miller’s poems welcome readers into private and public conversations in equal measure.
What is perhaps most striking about this collection is how Miller’s free-verse poems find rhythms that beat naturally within the heart of moments. These moments, both intimate and large, convey the labyrinthine architecture of memory and loss. Perforated’s opening poem, “Pantheon,” reenvisions the famous building through a child’s shadow to bridge the past with the present — an example of technique that is put to good use throughout this collection. Then, in “Italian Vocabulary: Intimissimi,” we are brought inside “a Trastevere church” to light a candle for a relationship lost:
I light candles,
repeat Intimissimi until
we are again together
in our platonic love.
Impossible.
My wish, this clatter
of coins in the collection box.
Miller’s poems traverse the Atlantic and, as we travel along, we encounter recurring vocabulary poems — which the poet (who is fluent in Italian) began in her debut chapbook and has carried into both full-length collections. A single word or phrase might bloom into a memory or pierce the shell of the structures we imagine as solid. In “Italian vocabulary: Vita,” for example, we are reminded of what light can do:
Across the street from our rented apartment, the morning sun lifts the yellow
ocher painted on the walls of the Eritrean embassy. Sunlight can shift weight,
density. This morning, the raised stones carved with shadows extend over the
Street.
Tension is threaded throughout Perforated, which we can observe through the poet’s use of food imagery. In “Pomegranate,” a fruit tree delights a child but marks the passage of time, and of absence:
I water it, another woman’s tree.
Or maybe I shouldn’t,
because of the drought.
We’ll be gone
before the fruit ripens.
Bread, sea salt, and olive oil offer hope in “Returning Home,” while “English Vocabulary: Lentils” reveals a devastating past through the voice of a beloved relative. This recurring motif is one that is marked by contrast. What might comfort and nourish might then expose a long-hidden, painful secret.
Perforated also includes recurring, numbered New York City poems that illuminate the fragility of our worlds — figuratively and otherwise — that so many of us struggle to acknowledge. To do so is to name our vulnerabilities. Yet, the NYC poems propose a view of vulnerability that emphasizes the ways in which this acknowledgement bonds us, which in itself is a strength: The bells toll, Miller writes in “New York City (1),” We face the new tower, silent. And then: Maybe this is exactly right, I think. All of us here, together. That this strength exists through community in difficult times is especially relevant today, and it reminds us of both what was and what could be.
Readers will note that architecture arises as the predominant motif in Perforated. As the collection moves towards its conclusion, Miller again returns to architecture in “Palimpsest,” this time inspired by a Florentine church to get at the heart of the book and its title:
There’s no exact word to describe seeing through
architecture to the other side.
Miller asks us to question what we might take for granted. What is thought to be permanent or solid becomes changeable and porous. Many of the poems in this collection seem to ask: What has been written over? What still stands? The structures of the poems allow a kind of permeability in their fractured lines and spaces in-between. One gets the feeling that we are seeing through in our reading, evoking a participatory exchange. Ultimately, what emerges is a challenge to re-see.
We may feel anxiety when we face impermanence. It weaves itself into stone and skin. Yet, perspective plays a crucial role in how we respond. I was fortunate to spend a few years in Japan, where I became familiar with the concept of mono no aware — an appreciation, if tinged with sadness, of the transient nature of all things. I was reminded of this concept throughout Perforated, particularly as “Palimpsest” continues, noting the echo of the past, the joy and pain of now, and the cycle of life reflected in its calling back to an earlier poem:
Silence and all the sounds of laughter and wails.
This is, after all, a monument to humans
crafted by artists and mathematicians.
If to perforate is to move through or into, to be perforated may be to fully embrace all that moves through us, and all that opens space within us. In my reading, this is what Miller’s book aims to do: To say yes to all of it, and yes, I see what is being asked of you too. There are moments of joy and melancholy and movement and stillness here, the accumulation of which we could also say adds up to a life lived.
Perforated will resonate with audiences interested in poetry that weaves personal narrative with social conscience. Readers drawn to poems that are alive to the ways in which language shapes memory and grief will find a rich landscape to explore here. The collection itself offers a way of engaging with uncertainty through communal, attentive reflection and re-engagement. In uncertain times, perhaps this is what poetry does best.
Dorothy Bendel’s writing has appeared in The Believer, Literary Hub, Catapult, The Threepenny Review, The New York Times, and additional publications. You can read more at dorothybendel.com.