TARTESSOS AND OTHER CITIES is Claire Millikin’s second book of poetry with 2Leaf Press that continues to explore homelessness. In this collection, Millikin uses the sensitivity of poetry to express some of the emotions surrounded by homelessness and loss. Named for Tartessos, a lost city on the Guadalquivir, a river in Andalusia, Spain that was likely buried by a devastating tidal wave in BC, the poems in TARTESSSOS gather lost cities and places that were not myths, but were once real. Throughout the collection, Millikin addresses questions such as, “What happened to home” and “Where do I come from?” that examines American geographies of loss, with the poems serving as archeological elements that persist against these losses. From New York City to Muscogee Country, Georgia, from New Haven, to the Haw River, TARTESSOS charts a map of disappearances and resistances to vanishing that make up part of the ghostly American landscape. In the end, Millikin leads readers to discover that home is not just the place where you happen to live, it is the place where you become yourself.
Contributors
Introduction by Fred Marchant
FRED MARCHANT is a poet and Professor of English and Literature at Suffolk University. He is the director of both the Creative Writing program and The Poetry Center at Suffolk University. Marchant’s most recent book of poetry, The Looking House (2009), was named by Barnes & Noble Review as one of the five best books of poetry in 2009. He is also the author of Tipping Point, winner of the 1993 Washington Prize in poetry, and Full Moon Boat (2000), and House on Water, House in Air (2002). He co-translated From a Corner of My Yard, (2006) by the Vietnamese poet Tran Dang Khoa. Marchant is also the editor of Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, 1937-1947 (2008), a selection that focuses on the work done while Stafford was a conscientious objector during World War II. Marchant graduated from Brown University and earned a PhD from The University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. He lives in Arlington, MA.
Readers' Reviews
AMAZON
I always enjoy this poets intellect and gift of eloquence. She invites you in with simple titles,”Party girls” or”Popcorn ” or “sacrifice”…and for me, as a psychologist, I love how she takes you into a complex inner world while surrounded with intriguing descriptions of the physical. She is a powerful messenger of ideas. Dr. Wendy Satin, Boca Raton, FL (7/23/2016)
Here's What People Are Saying
“In TARTESSOS, Claire Millikin takes us deep into both the imagined and real cities and houses of the mind. Memory strikes an urgent chord in her work, haunted by the family and strangers who step in and out of a world that is lost and found and lost again. “I was born and raised in that country of damage/ behind the rains,” Millikin tells us, as she considers the tension between the elegiac and the erotic. TARTESSOS is a stunning mix of evocative beauty and remarkably fi ne-tuned language.” ~Kathleen Ellis, author of Vanishing Act (2007)
“Tartessos was a semi-mythical harbor city on the south coast of the Iberian Peninsula. The Tartessians were important tradespeople, most notably of gold, silver, tin and bronze. In Claire Millikin’s TARTESSOS AND OTHER CITIES, she offers poetry that is metal-rich, that solders narratives and images of precious value. With a deft hand, final couplets in poems like ‘Tift County, Georgia’ become lasting epigrams: “Only the surface layer / of history passes for truth.” These poems seek out uneasy passages into tombs where the speaker examines unsettling memories of human activity in the past that are enacted anew before the reader’s eyes. Using passive and active remote sensing abilities, Millikin’s poems are amulets of hope, endurance and survival.” ~Sean Frederick Forbes, author of Providencia: A Book of Poems (2013)
“The project of Claire Millikin’s TARTESSOS AND OTHER CITIES is to come to terms with the condition of being cut off from origins — the timeless subject of exile. These poems enact the difficult work of retracing one’s way through imagination to lost home and lost memory, landscape calling out to be mended. The book’s honesty and precision in looking back achieves remarkable transformation — the possibility of seeing the present moment anew.” ~Debra Nystrom, author of Night Sky Frequencies New and Selected Poems (2016)
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