Tender the River: Poems
Matt W. Miller
Focusing on the Merrimack River, Tender the River weaves historical, geological, social, and personal narratives together, from the last ice age, to the indigenous tribes that settled there and before driven off by Europeans, to the birth of the industrial age and the urban decline and rebirth of the late 20th century. It hopes to be a celebratory and critical look at the relationship between the various human worlds as well as the natural world they occupy and give readers a sense of the bigger story we are all a part of by using this one small scratch of the earth as an example.
“In Tender the River, Matt W. Miller beautifully makes and unmakes the story of the Merrimack River through the language of mills, factories, floe, and okta. These poems are full of risk and courage, confronting memory with complex insight and a dogged grit. He does not shy away from that which startles and disrupts. I return to reading these poems aloud, hearing their bends, meanders, and digressions. The hidden meter. What’s absent and present. Every single line tells a story, moving us ‘toward all the light we have left.’”
—January Gill O’Neil, author of Rewilding and Misery Islands
Matt W. Miller grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts and is the author of the poetry collections The Wounded for the Water (Salmon Poetry), Club Icarus, selected by Major Jackson as the winner of the 2012 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize and Cameo Diner: Poems. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University and a Walter E. Dakin Fellow in Poetry at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, he teaches English at Phillips Exeter Academy and lives with his family in coastal New Hampshire.
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