Chloe Yelena Miller lives in Washington, D.C., with her family. She is the author of Perforated (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2026), Viable (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2021) and Unrest (Finishing Line Press, 2013). She holds an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College (poetry) and a BA from Smith College (Italian language and literature). She has received residencies from Bread Loaf, A Room of Her Own and Vermont Studio Center and has received three DC Arts and Humanities grants for her writing.
Kristina Marie Darling: Your stunning poetry collection, Perforated, just launched from Lily Poetry Review Books. What are three things you’d like readers to know before they delve into the work itself?
The poems are mostly about public and private grief. While the griefs described are mine, they might remind you of your own losses. I hope that’s ok and you can spend some time remembering those you love who are no longer here.
You can read the poems in any order you like. There’s a circular quality to grief, which a lot of these poems refer to, and the poems can be read in a variety of orders.
I live with half my heart in Italy and half in the United States. Some of the poems refer back to Italy or back again to the United States. You don’t have to speak Italian to follow the poems. If you feel at home in more than one place or language, perhaps you will recognize yourself in that in-between space of threes: there, here and in-between.
KMD: Time in your work feels layered rather than linear—with past and present coexisting in the same rhetorical space. How do you think about time when structuring a poem?
I have a poem titled, “Palimpsest,” and that word, which is often used in archeology, reflects a co-existence of many layers at once. I think time exists like this. We are in the present remembering the past and hoping for the future. I don’t find that I experience many moments that are singular and disconnected from everything else. In this way, I try to connect those moments in poems.
In the poem, “I love,” which is after Kay Ryan’s poem “After Zeno,” I think about how we are who we were at all moments at once, but also not. We must grow and change, but that is happening on top of the layers of who we once were and what we experienced.
In general, reading – or looking at art or old pictures, listening to music, etc. – offers the same sort of time-condensing experience to me. I find that other art forms can serve as generative prompts for me to time-jump and make new connections.
I don’t always know if the moments in the poems are exactly factual, but they always feel true to me in an essential way. Time can blur details, but (perhaps) not emotions.
KMD: Several poems revisit the same locations (New York City, Italy) across time. What draws you back to these places on the page?
Both New York City and Florence, Italy, are vivid emotional homes for me. I grew up outside of New York City in northern New Jersey. When 9/11 happened, I was working for an American university in Florence, Italy. That morning, I was running a fire drill in a dormitory full of American and international students in Florence, Italy. Because of that physical distance – but also emotional vicinity as I was surrounded by people connected to New York City – I have felt like there are gaps in my experience. I have watched many movies and news reports and read books that took place during 9/11 in New York City in an effort to connect and understand what happened that day near my childhood home while I was an ocean away.
Twenty-one years later, I returned to New York City on the 9/11 anniversary. These places and experiences are all very vivid in my memories, in part because they pose questions. I find that the poems exist in those questions.
During my visit to New York City in 2022, I wrote a lyric essay about the experience of returning. The essay, “New York City,” was published in Grace & Gravity’s Grace in Love (volume X) the following year. In Perforated, the essay has been broken into smaller prose poems. The resulting narrative is a chorus woven throughout the book connecting grief and distance with these particular places (I hope.)
Italy and its language, art and culture, has called to me as an Italian American with familial roots in southern Italy. After learning the language at Smith College as an undergrad, I am comfortable speaking Italian. Learning a second language has influenced my writing in English, too. I am fascinated by both grammars and how they carry culture.
My family and I are lucky to be able to return to Italy each summer (where my husband teaches a class for an American university.) I find that my time in Italy is a generative writing time. We try to see (and eat!) as much as we can, which means encountering new things. These encounters with something new often illuminate something about myself that I thought was familiar.
KMD: What surprised you most while writing this collection?
I write poems and then look for themes as I work to collect and order them. I thought I was writing towards the title, “A brief memoir of light,” but there was less light in the poems than I’d hoped. I have been asked if I’m “optimistic” as a person or as a writer and since I mostly write about grief and loss, I was trying to nudge myself towards a certain light and optimism. I suppose the result suggests this is not my natural instinct. That said, writing a certain truth is an optimism for me.
KMD: What does poetry allow you to say that other forms cannot?
To me, poetry is both the silence (the unwritten and white space) and that which is written around the center. Ideally, the reader is invited in to fill in the silence with their own memories. In my poem, “Ars Poetica or Pesca Tabacchiera,” I write:
Young, I didn’t kiss & tell, but I wanted to. Especially after the first
time. I wanted to ask friends if they felt the same here, there.
I still don’t describe those touches, people, the light and shadows. I
write around the center.
I have written essays and am (very slowly) working on a memoir about growing up as a hyphenated American who moves to her family’s country of origin. I find that prose allows me to be more direct while poetry offers more space for silence. For me, the unsaid or unwritten in poetry can call to the reader to pause and then participate in the poem.
KMD: What are you working on? What can readers look forward to?
My mother, Melabee M. Miller, and I have been collaborating to build a collection of poems and art around breast cancer and breasts. Her breast cancer is in remission and I have undergone extensive testing as someone who is high risk. The work reflects a personal history of breasts considering societal pressures and expectations, as well as illness. The first poem to be published from this collection, tentatively titled Clean Margins, was “Breast Buds” (Rogue Agent, January 1, 2026.)