Float by Wendy Miles

In Wendy Miles’s stunning debut collection, memories break and enter the rooms of the present and objects come alive with the spirits of those who once possessed them. Miles’s poems are inextricably tied to place – pastures, houses, yards and rooms – but there’s a restlessness to them, too, an exquisite tension to their lyricism and a refusal to be still. These poems leap and roam and strike out into territory that’s as startling as it is fresh. “Love is a breath,” Miles writes at the conclusion of the titular poem. Reader, this outstanding book will have you catching yours.

–Sarah Freligh, author of Sad Math

In Float, Wendy Miles excavates place and memory in search of what “will not be called a ghost for many years.” Her sacred elegies unearth relationships to mine their links: a bird is a girl “pleading for mouth aflame,” a cat is a mother, “face streaked behind a roof of hands,” and a father is a redbud, yielding “to the hush, the barest pink light.” At the center: the tether of suffering to love.

–Allison Wilkins, author of Girl Who

Float is a remarkable debut collection filled with vital, visceral imagery and fully formed within the fractured and yet unclouded syntax of remembrance. I was held throughout by its pulse and the cleaving resonance of its crafted language. Miles gives us lines taut as thread wound around a finger, so that wherever the speaker of these poems points our attention, a heartbeat is always present.

–Jon Pineda, author of Let’s No One Get Hurt