The Pocket Museum of Natural History by Michele M Miller – NWVS #184

If there is a museum vast enough to hold worlds both real and imagined—and small enough to carry away in your pocket with all of its lovers, creatures, shards and wonders still shaking inside it—Michele M Miller’s debut chapbook is it. Miller’s poems alternately lull us to dreaming and slap us awake with a strangely familiar voice—the throbbing voice of a god in the mouth of a caterpillar—guiding us through a place where all that makes us human sits still but not quietly, daring us to look and be changed.

–Stacey R. Forbes, author of Little Thistles, winner of the 2023 New Women’s Voices Series Prize from Finishing Line Press

In her poem, “Confession of a Lepidopterist,” Miller says, I breathe, and it is you who tremble. And I do. To read The Pocket Museum of Natural History is to adore and be adored by creatures seen but rarely touched. Moths and bees, piranhas, an animated shirt torn by thorns, a pack of hyenas and their queen all hang from lines of Miller’s making in a world that is startlingly strange, and intimately familiar. Tactile and sensual, Miller’s book endures as a touchstone that remains forever in your pocket. This museum of living poems will make you see life—and perhaps your likeness within it—quite differently.

–Stacey R. Forbes, author of Little Thistles, winner of the 2023 New Women’s Voices Series Prize from Finishing Line Press

The Pocket Museum of Natural History is an erotic curation of confessions, litanies, odes and siren songs that fill a mythopoeic cabinet of curiosity, invention, and radiance. Disinterred histories, rarified ruminative moments, and scientific facts evoke a found world: rough-hewn and familiar, alive with death and discovery. Miller invites us to open a compendium of loss, desire, and the superfamilies of butterflies, at once elegant yet teetering on the cusp of outrageousness. She is keen to speak the language of the sublime, a voice for those otherwise muted by indifference or oversight: she is not afraid to take on the point of view of fossil fishes, an aging lepidopterist consumed by love for his moth, an exotic snail, or simple stones: I can’t allow these tokens to decompose /into simply shapes, or remember meaning / I thought was true and is no longer. The math of memory, intimacy, grief, and perspectives of both giving and getting—plus whatever vastness lies between—operates, in Miller’s poems, like the poles of a magnet.

–Rebecca Byrkit, author of Whoa and Zealand