Philip Levine recommends
Overtime, poems by Joseph Millar: “If you want the real news of how America lives, of what it’s like to be here with us, Joseph Millar is your poet. What are the folks like at Ed’s Auto Repair ‘that dim cool mine / smelling of gas and iron’ or what’s it like to be at Hefka’s Bar with Thomas Wyatt or at the track at Bay Meadows with Herrick? What’s it like outside Monterey when ‘night drifts into the artichoke fields / And the swallows veer off toward the hills’?
Overtime will tell you with exactitude and delicacy in poems like none you’ve read before. Millar knows a country, an America, that’s been here all along waiting for its voice: it’s time we listened.” (Eastern Washington)