Inspired by her birthplace, Bermuda, Miller successfully blurs the line between exploiting and normalizing the exotic: a seahorse is both the f hole of a cello and a horseshoe pick; the Sand Dollar, an oddity found regularly on the island's beaches, is compared to an antique star map; a clock in an old supply store is "a porthole with the sea lapping its blue rim". But if they reference and conjure the exotic, Miller's poems are grounded by the realities of everyday life and by the sometimes troubled cultural dynamics of both her adopted United States and her island home, where "everything seen tribal" and, in the title poem, where someone "claiming a geography of persons the empire sent across the world" dons white gloves to serve sandwiches to "fair English" church-goers. These are poems that are like "the ocean's ripples when an anchor strikes deep." Paul Sean Maddern, poet, author of The Beachcomber's Report
The poems of Nancy Miller are deliciously rich in imagery and metaphor. There is a subtle complexity of meaning embedded in them, enhanced by her intuitive ability to make music with words.
John Lyons. Painter, poet, author of No Apples in Eden: New and Selected poems
Nancy Anne Miller pushes each poem of her newest collection, Boiling Hot into a performance of music and meaning. Equipped with an anthropologist's eye and a polymath's mind, her poems play with ordinary materials, reveal how the "repeated shedding" of a snake's skin "leaves the tape measure of what it was." Through Miller's examination of history and identity, old Empire relics collide with New World knickknacks, poems tackle the thorny legacies of England, Bermuda and New England. In one poem, an antique star map, "round as a crystal ball," harkens the child's circle of marbles, where "large planets knock out smaller ones: taws hit pewees." Typing on her Olivetti in another poem Miller declares: "If I could make [writing] precise...[and] ceremonial I would." In the deft and dazzling Boiling Hot: she does.
Julia Shipley, poet, author of The Academy of Hay, Winner of the 2011 Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize
About the Author: Nancy Anne Miller is a Bermudian poet with six books: Somersault (Guernica Editions 2015), Because There Was No Sea (Anaphora Literary Press 2014), Immigrant's Autumn (Aldrich Press 2014). Water Logged (Aldrich Press 2016), Star Map (FutureCycle press 2016). Island Bound Mail (Kelsay Books 2017) Her poems have appeared in Edinburgh Review (UK), Agenda (UK), Ambit (UK), Stand (UK), The International Literary Quarterly (UK), Magma (UK), Journal of Postcolonial Writing (UK), Wasafiri (UK), Mslexia (UK), New Welsh Review (UK), The Moth (IE), A New Ulster (IE), Southword Journal (IE), The Fiddlehead (CA), The Dalhousie Review (CA), The Toronto Quarterly blog (CA), Postcolonial Text (CA), Transnational Literatures (AU), The Caribbean Writer (VI), tongues of the ocean (BS), Sargasso: Journal of Caribbean Literature (PR), Bim (BB), Poui (BB), Moko: Caribbean Arts and Letters (TT), The Arts Journal (GY) The Pacuare Anthology (CR), Metaphor ( PH), The Missing Slate (PK), The Open Road Review (IN), Papercuts (IN), Poetry Salzburg Review (AT), Proud Flesh: New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics, Consciousness USA), Journal of Caribbean Literatures (USA), St. Katherine's Review (USA), Hampton Sydney Poetry Review(USA), Theodate (USA) Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (USA), Interviewing the Caribbean (USA), among others. She has an M Litt in Creative Writing from Univ. of Glasgow, is a MacDowell Fellow, and is a three-time recipient of Bermuda Art Council Grants. She teaches poetry workshops in Bermuda and represented Bermuda in Poetry World Cup. She organized Ber-Mused, a poetry reading for BDA's 400 in 2009. She was shortlisted for the small axe salon (Caribbean) poetry prize (2013), guest edited tongues of the ocean (BS), and was included in Arts Etc Barbados (BB) tribute for Kamau Brathwaite. She resides in the bucolic Washington,
