Wilderness Lessons

Wilderness Lessons by JM Miller is a love note to the planet that risks burning, a song of loss and connection, and a prayer for being alive and becoming “the animal you were meant to be.” An Eco-poetry book of personal and political honesty, of the violence and elegy of living, this debut collection considers the dissolution of human separateness as a way to create a new space for identity that is fluid—tracing the upwell of violence against people on the fringes of binary constructions and violence against animals and the planet. “Pronoun says the planet is burning,” the poet writes of sun rays and our beating hearts. Written by a poet of tremendous energy, ecstatic imagery, and deeply inherited wisdom, these poems conjure a new understanding of the American poem from JM’s trans-gender, trans-being, howling throat pointed at a sky still brimming with stars.