In Island Bound Mail Nancy Anne Miller writes about her birthplace Bermuda from the viewpoints of both America and Britain. She explores issues such as an identity formed in exile, the complexities of belonging, and reveals the multilayers of colonial life on a semitropical island almost seven hundred miles out at sea. She unveils touristic notions of paradise as a metaphor for the silenced feminine and uses the circular movement of image metaphor to purposely feminize language. To allow the multi meanings of the poem to radiate out over the page, and not to have just a linear intentional thrust. Oftentimes when the story of the Caribbean and Caribbean literature is told, the island of Bermuda is not included in that story. But in these sharp, piercing and resplendent poems, Nancy Anne Miller effortlessly but also quite succinctly offers the Bermudian experience as being integral to the Caribbean experience. Here are poems that are offered like praise songs to the ocean. Fountain pens that "leaks/ Turquoise ink as I write about my isles." The lines of these poems are sharp and taut and exquisitely crafted. The imagery gorgeous. Nancy Anne Miller's poems are a riveting revelation.
-Jacqueline Bishop is the author of several books including The Gymnast and Other Positions, which was awarded the 2016 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, Non-fiction.
Nancy Anne Miller's latest collection of poetry, Island Bound Mail, offers a glimpse of Bermuda from the eyes of a poet both removed from and intimately connected to the isolated island of her birth. The past whispers through this collection in the form of heirloom china and the lost ships of a family steeped in a maritime history; but the timelessness of the Bermudian landscape is constantly evoked with all the immediacy of storms and the tenacity of allamanda vines. At once both lyrical and studied, the poems speak to the slow creep of personal history, a steady yearning for horizons and what lies beyond, and the connections to others that ground us firmly in the place where we find ourselves - by birth, happenstance, or fate.
-Dr. Kim Dismont-Robinson Bermuda Folk Officer
Nancy Anne Miller is a Bermudian poet who has published five poetry collections: Somersault (Guernica Editions), Immigrant's Autumn (Aldrich Press), Because There Was No Sea (Anaphora Literary Press), Water Logged (Aldrich Press), and Star Map (FutureCycle Press.) Her poems have appeared in several international journals. She teaches workshops in Bermuda.
About the Author: Nancy Anne Miller is a Bermudian poet with five books: Somersault (Guernica Edition), Immigrant's Autumn (Aldrich Press), Because There Was No Sea (Anaphora Literary Press), Water Logged (Aldrich Press), and Star Map. (Future Cycle Press). 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), Mslexia (UK), New Welsh Review (UK), Wasafiri(UK), The Moth (IE), A New Ulster (IE), Southword (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), The Missing Slate (PK), The Open Road Review (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 represented Bermuda in Poetry World Cup and in 2009 organized Ber-Mused, a poetry reading for BDA's 400 th Anniversary. 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 Edward Kamau Brathwaite.
