THE BOOK OF PROPS • Named one of the 15 best poetry books and one of the 5 best second poetry collections of 2009 by Coldfront Magazine • Named one of the 100 best books of 2009 by the Kansas City Star "Transformations—from the everyday to the wondrous and/or haunting—are everywhere in Miller’s elegant second book. The poems are at once dreamlike and fervent in their will to cleave to the material world. [. . .] Miller remains a poet to watch, and one who strives to 'separate / the seeing from what’s seen.'" —Publishers Weekly (starred review) "In his second collection, Miller quietly disassembles everyday life, identifying the rhetoric, folly, expectation, and artifice that make up the world. [. . .] Like his characters, Miller makes a vast impact using the smallest stroke—he is careful and suspenseful, wary of flamboyance [. . .] Readers in search of ready-made epiphanies are not welcome here." —The New Yorker "A mesmerizing and elegant inquiry into the physics of being. [. . .] His lyrics are steeped in longing, stoked by tender irony and luminous with heightened receptivity. Akin in spirit to the works of Wallace Stevens and Charles Simic, Miller’s poems are profoundly human in their philosophical puzzles." —Donna Seaman, Kansas City Star "Wayne Miller's latest work, The Book of Props [. . .] crafts a world both strange and intimate, and his poems are always journeys home. [. . .] Miller's primary concern is to track the movement from the original perception to the imagining that follows. His poems are indices of that challenge." —Justin Sider, Colorado Review "[Miller] provides greater illumination the more that you read him. He has the stuff of an outstanding poet. He has a mind bred from Stevens and an eye bred from Williams, synthesizing them with a flare for passionate romance that, in its most effective applications, allows for humans as a part of the world—in part for our ability to control light as survival against darkness." —John Deming, Coldfront Magazine "If Basho were around today he might write something like this [. . .] From many notes, Miller makes one seductive song. In solitude he maps out refuge. In the humming anonymity of a highway, he pulls us into the odometer’s glow [. . .] It’s easy to believe poems like these 'keep the wind in motion.' Basho would be proud." —Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, The Brooklyn Rail "The Book of Props is a world of mannequins, smokestacks and 'the city's billow of light.' With clarity like that of A. R. Ammons, Wayne Miller creates his own world." —J. Michael Wahlgren, Gently Read Literature "Wayne Miller’s an investigative reporter of consciousness, examining subjectivity as if there were no maps. And he’s right, there aren’t; every I awakes to its own peculiar presence—here given compelling form in rewarding elegant lyrics." —Mark Doty "The outside world is visible in and through these poems, which are thrilling in their metaphysical questioning and deeply satisfying in their perceptions. [. . .] Lush, lavish, and achingly accurate, [Miller’s] words have an almost corporeal realness to them—a kiss that becomes an object pressed between two lovers, a 'room that will be the ghost of right now / for as long as we carry it.' I was transfixed by this book." —Rachel Zucker "Wayne Miller’s poetry is entranced, luminous, supernaturally poised. He drifts through a world that is twilit, looming, strangely stilled, and somehow in need of his care, as if he had stayed up till some record late hour to watch over dreams and scenes and scenes disarmed by sleep[.] [. . .] He is the purest kind of lyric poet, neither narrating nor explaining but saying over and over their beauty and poignance and power." —James Richardson