Autobiomythography & Gallery, By Joe Millar. New York: Brookly Arts Press, 2007. $12.00 (pa.) ISBN: 0-9788257-0-5

The poems in Millar’s debut collection dance across the page, ignoring between-the-lines conventions of layout. Similarly, Millar’s poems dance from confessional sliced-life scenes to more cerebral contemplations. These poems tend to be in the how-to-live vein, as Millar meditates on his (?) life and the world around him, if one could be said to “meditate” at break-neck speed.

The title poem is a narrative description of Millar’s early interest in an author named Royce, placing a young Millar in scene with the author. It is an inventive approach to chronicling inspiration.

Many of these poems utlize partiche and inventive layouts. Millar includes series of poems, including excerpts from “The Simthsonian Guide to North American Shapes,” and carious incarnations of “Memory of the Body.”

Millar utilizes these elements to tackle the problems of living. In “Listen:Conch,” Millar meditates upon a conch shell and what its complexity means to him. He begins, “That growing-into things, motion./ How it relies on/ everything else in order to be itself.” Describing the shell, he states, “see how the spotted whitewash pivots and churns, regrpups,/ moves again toward the spiral of the conch mired in the breaking waves.” The design of this shell Millar attributes to, “instruction from the creature/ that abandoned it, as we have been abandoned.” Millar ends with the conclusion that “life feels mostly like just motion.”

In “Gun Music,” Millar describes being woken by gunshots. Beside him, his lover sleeps, still, and he describes her;

           It is startling how the white of her naked back
          draped in bedsheets is enough at times.
          The blue knots of her spine, arms folded over the white pillows—
          The harmony of everyday

He continues, later: “I would not wake her to the strange truth/ that all we own and know/ contains the lovely shrapnel of our destruction.”

He hears another shot and describes it magnificently: “Another gunshot, and I grow into it/ as its echo wallows,/ swell the belly of the city.” He concludes, “I am trapped in the listening,/ I am more alive for it.”

The book is divided into the main section and a smaller “Gallery,” a dense series that relates to the “Memory of the Body” poems. Here, Millar mixes references to art and life, blending the two.

This is a dense and wonderful collection. More than any other collection I’ve reviewed this year, I can see myself returning to Millar’s poems.

-Reviewed by CL Bledsoe