Deciphering the Desert: a book of poems by Susan Cummins Miller

Each time Susan Cummins Miller walked into her childhood library in Pasadena, she saw these words above the door: “Be made whole by the great spaces and the stars.” The poems in Deciphering the Desert are filled with the stars. And shells. And dry bones and shining stones. Azure skies and back roads, Joshua trees, pack rats and yellow butterflies. Susan’s curiosity about the natural world began by asking questions on summer trips with her family throughout the West. And receiving answers. In one poem, Miller questions the La Brea Tar Pit woman: “Did you ask questions? Did you feel the subtle shift in tenor when answers appeared, as if from the very air?” The poems in Deciphering the Desert are crafted the same way the earth is: with specific details and colors, and the names of things intact “in the starlit secret places, … the riverside camps.” The mysteries of nature become clearer as we are made whole by Susan’s words.

–Liza Porter, author of Red Stain and Keep the Singing.

From a plastic dashboard Jesus to bared-soul musings, poet/geologist Susan Cummins Miller leads readers on a lyrical field trip through family, culture, and, most of all, the natural world–thus helping us decipher far more than the desert.

–Wynne Brown, author of The Forgotten Botanist: Sara Plummer Lemmon’s Life of Science and Art