AFTER HOUSES is an extended meditation on homelessness. In unflinching, raw poetry, poet Claire Millikin explores states of homelessness, and a longing for, even a devotion to, houses—houses as spaces where one could be safe and at ease. The poems move through an American landscape, between the South and the North, between childhood and adulthood, reaching toward a home that’s never reached, but always at one’s fingertips. Throughout the collection, Millikin draws from personal and family history, from classical mythology and architectural theory, to shape a poetry of empathy, in which some of the places where people get lost in America are faced and given place. AFTER HOUSES echo the voices of girls who have not quite survived, but who persist, intact in the way that Rimbaud insists on intactness, in words. Cover photo: Gary Baller, Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission, Copyright © 2007.

Contributors

Introduction by Tara Betts

TARA BETTS is a mixed-race award-winning poet, author and scholar of African American and white French descent. Betts is the author of Break the Habit (2016), Arc and Hue (2009) and the libretto, The Greatest: An Homage to Muhammad Ali (2010). She is the co-editor of The Beiging of America, Personal Narratives about Being Mixed Race in the Twenty-First Century (2017) and editor of Adventures in Black and White (2018). She holds a Ph.D. in English from Binghamton University, and an MFA in creative writing from New England College. Betts is currently a teacher and independent scholar in Chicago.

Readers' Reviews

AMAZON
Claire Milliken writes moving poems of profound dignity and grace. Her language is gorgeous. Her poems beckon you to enter a secret world, one of breaths and whispers, promising to let you in on the secret — maybe. What she does so well is to walk that fine line between the accessible public persona and the inaccessible private persona. This creates a delicious tension where you’re never quite sure who’s talking to you, only that you want to be led deeper into her world. It’s as though you’re in the wardrobe and in Narnia, all at the same time. Her poems ask the question if the personal is always the political, and they let you find your way to your own answer. Highly recommend this collection! Poetry Lover, Maine (8/21/2014)

Here's What People Are Saying

“Claire Millikin writes with deep feeling, craft, and delicacy about trauma; she makes obsessive, careful music — in the manner of Joseph Cornell’s sublime work — from her repeated divinations of foreclosed and melancholy vistas. An astute critic as well as a scrupulous and admirably driven poet, she combines formal élan and emotional intensity. I think of her poems as following in the noble, painful tradition of Maurice Blanchot — language reaching toward silence.” ~Wayne Koestenbaum Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and author of Blue Stranger With Mosaic Background (2012)

“As Claire Millikin puts it in the final poem of her AFTER HOUSES, POETRY FOR THE HOMELESS, ‘This is a book of escape and survival.’ Memory here does more than talk, it sings through eloquently detailed poems about exile from a beloved house, about ‘crossing thresholds’ in cars with a baby, about growing older. Although all of us readers’ lives differ, this book can also be shared as ‘our history. Don’t turn away.’” ~Henry Braun, poet and peace activist, and author of Loyalty, New and Selected Poems (2006)

“Claire Millikin’s deeply perceptive and elegiac poems remind us that the words we use to define the world are the same words that define our losses. Acknowledging the perilous journey of human survival, these poems teach us that “the four walls of/ a house may vanish if/ we do not define it.” Both lush with language and haunting, AFTER HOUSES is a work of uncanny beauty.” ~Kathleen Ellis, author of Vanishing Act (2007)

“The house, Gaston Bachelard tells us, ‘is our corner of the world . . . our first universe, a cosmos in every sense of the word.’ Millikin’s hibernal, transient, gypsy economy of pawn and rent offers a hagiography not of sanctuary but of abandonment, vanishing, nightmare, salvage, banishment, and betrayal. In the triptych altars of dressing rooms, train station bathrooms, cinderblock restaurants, libraries, closets, cars, and the carapace of second-hand coats, the narrators of these haunted poems articulate an implacable, restive heimweh. ‘This history of tarnish and salvage wires my soul,’ says one speaker. That one never feels quite safe in these poems is testament to their post-Lapsarian truth and power.” ~Lisa Russ Spear, author of Vanitas, Rough: Poems (2012) and The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry (2013)

Top reviews from AMAZON
5.0 out of 5 stars

Poetry Lover, August 21, 2014
Poems of dignity and grace

Claire Milliken writes moving poems of profound dignity and grace. Her language is gorgeous. Her poems beckon you to enter a secret world, one of breaths and whispers, promising to let you in on the secret — maybe. What she does so well is to walk that fine line between the accessible public persona and the inaccessible private persona. This creates a delicious tension where you’re never quite sure who’s talking to you, only that you want to be led deeper into her world. It’s as though you’re in the wardrobe and in Narnia, all at the same time. Her poems ask the question if the personal is always the political, and they let you find your way to your own answer. Highly recommend this collection!

S de Leon, September 1, 2014
Millikin’s poetry is mysterious, poignant and quintessentially American

Riveted by “Motels”, I was lured even further by “After Houses” into Claire Millikin’s world of survival and secrecy. Millikin’s poetry is mysterious, yet her story is pure American. She writes of the vulnerabilities of girlhood, southern roots, hard times, even hunger, and enriches some of her more recent work with the salty flavors of Maine and motherhood. With deep feeling, she is intertwined with those who have lived dirt poor and apparently overcome the unspeakable, though she simultaneously demonstrates command of her craft, and the intellectual influences of her first-class Yale education and UVa academic pursuits. This is a poet deserving of more recognition from the highest levels of our contemporary poetry world.

Dr. Wendy Satin, August 19, 2014
Please read this if you want to be broadened, enlightened, and in love with the written word.

I felt breathless and broadened in the reading of this book. I sighed … gasped … cried and became wiser and more sensitive to myself and to sociopolitical situations. I also fell in love with words which Claire has a supreme gift for reaching for …detail, beauty, flow, poignant poetry and empathy.