Name: Ransom Street
SKU: RS042019
Availability: InStock

Ransom Street

APR. 2019

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Author: Claire Millikin Introduction: Kathleen Ellis Print Edition: ISBN: 978-1-940939-90-2 Product Details: 5 x 8; 154 pp. eBook Edition: ISBN: 978-1-940939-91-9 LCCN: 2018951795 REVIEWS: 2LP BOOK REVIEWS SKU: RS042019 Categories: Clare Millikin, Poetry Tag: homelessness

Meet The Author

RANSOM STREET is Claire Millikin’s third collection of poetry with 2Leaf Press. The poems in this volume meditate on the idea of ransom to explore legacies of violence in the southeastern United States, ultimately seeking moments of reckoning for these unsettled histories. A fee paid to release a prisoner, ransom can, Millikin shows us, initiate a sacrificial act that drives people apart, but also, when paid, can bring the homeless home. The poems in RANSOM STREET move through the question of release elliptically, exploring these abstract implications of ransom through a fictional street in a southeastern American town. Th e presence of inherited violence, cultural and familial, haunt the terrain of RANSOM STREET, as the poems move through a geography of ghosts, always seeking “ransom,” the sacrificial act that returns the self to wholeness. Cover art: Dé-Jon Graves.

Contributors

Introduction by Kathleen Ellis

KATHLEEN ELLIS is the author of five poetry collections, the most recent being Narrow River to the North. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Maine Arts Commission. Her poetry and translations have been published in Beloit Poetry Journal, New England Review, and the Southern Poetry Review, among others. She teaches at the University of Maine at Orono and, in 2014, had poems set to music in a CD titled Dear Darwin.

Here's What People Are Saying

“Claire Millikin’s stunning new collection, RANSOM STREET, sounds the key notes of a book that tells in sharpened lyric moments the story of a young woman’s coming of age in the face of violence, violation, homelessness, utter alone-ness. Keats called our suffering a ‘vale of soul-making.’ Down in that valley is where we find RANSOM STREET and this poetry of every wakened nerve.” ~Fred Marchant, author of Said Not Said: Poems (2017)

“’I took up this music, swept thin,’ writes Claire Millikin in RANSOM STREET. These poems stand as lithe and learned testimonies to a girlhood bruised by rejection, hunger, abuse, and neglect. Millikin shies from nothing; stoic, persevering, modest. ‘Then, at last, tell the truth. All of it,’ she commands herself, and as she speaks, she enriches us.” ~Lynn Levin, author of Miss Plastique (2013)

“Claire Millikin’s poems exhibit how vulnerability is strength, and how memory can sometimes prop us upright. In RANSOM STREET, Millikin claims “A book is ephemeral, built of names, or numbers,” but I say these poems are built from wind, the tangled networks of roots relaying messages to each other like trees, and “a boat of language” kept afloat by the tenacity of craft.” ~Tara Betts, author of Break the Habit (2016)