Praise for This Miraculous Turning

In general, poets are not saints, yet in his quiet but unapologetic intelligence, his passion, humility, and wisdom, and his understanding of good and evil, Joseph Mills gives us poems that could change the world. Deeply affecting, these poems show us how to live with one another. "I'm searching," he says, "for the right forms for these poems, ones as simple and solid as wooden bowls." Everything here is true: measured, faultless. You do not want to miss this book. This Miraculous Turning is a bona fide miracle.

— Kelly Cherry, former Poet Laureate of Virginia and author of The Life and Death of Poetry: Poems

Joseph Mills writes the best kind of poems about family. These are unsentimental, frank pieces that open from the private to the public, reminding us that we are more than parents and children, but are members of a world that we create and inhabit together. Beautifully crafted, sometimes humorous, and often heartbreaking, This Miraculous Turning is a poignant meditation on family, race, religion, and identity in modern America.

— Kelly Davio, author of Burn This House

Disturbingly brilliant, breaking boundaries with shocking immediacy, This Miraculous Turning lays bare a trail of poems that navigate extreme terrain. These poems sear, disfigure, dismantle and reconstruct the truths of a history that informs otherness and taboos. Joseph Mills offers lyrical beauty inside a turbulent storm of history, memory, and hope that dances the bones of the nameless child free and gives flesh to the spirits in an explicit celebration of love and grace. 

— Jaki Shelton Green, author of Breath of a Song: New and Selected Poems

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About the Author

A professor at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Joseph Mills holds an endowed chair, the Susan Burress Wall Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities. He has published six collections of poetry with Press 53. His book This Miraculous Turning was awarded the 2015 Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry, and his collection Angels, Thieves, and Winemakers was called “a must have for wine lovers” by the Washington Post. His poetry has been featured several times on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac and in former U.S. poet laureate Ted Kooser's nationally syndicated newspaper column “American Life in Poetry.” In addition to his volumes of poetry, he has researched and written two editions of A Guide to North Carolina’s Wineries with his wife, Danielle Tarmey. He also has edited a collection of film criticism A Century of the Marx Brothers. He has degrees in literature from the University of Chicago, the University of New Mexico, and the University of California, Davis. 

www.JosephRobertMills.com