Perforated

Chloe Yelena Miller's Perforated offers us intimate, confiding poems that ask us to lean closer. "Can you keep a secret?" the poems say. This is a book of lost friendships and lost loves, the world an "Ever rotating exhibit of light and dark," the regrets we have decades later over "what can go wrong / without the right words." Throughout, the speaker-always a mother who fears the future-worries about English vocabulary and newly learned Italian phrases, as if learning language might teach us to mourn more easily this difficult present or help us to find, at last, a place we might call home.

- Jehanne Dubrow,

author of Civilians