Nowhere Nearer [Paperback]

Is nowhere a place we can get closer to? In her compelling second collection, Alice Miller tackles the circularity of thought, the company of the dead, and the lure of alternative futures. These poems rip into pockets of histories, trying to change facts and voices, searching for the word's version of music's home key. They dare you to visit, through a series of cities, the futures we never let happen.

'Here is a poet who wants to speak in our/plainest tongues but who also aims to sing my way out. Alice Miller looks hard at history's terrifying straight lines, yet time and again turns to the obsessive, sometimes redemptive circlings of art. She knows that in a universe ruled by time and death, words can both rescue and destroy us, sometimes in a single utterance.'
Bill Manhire

'Alice Miller's poetry delights in the music of surprise, often playing prosodic continuities against a percussive mise-en-page. It invites us into a deceptively transparent universe that must, in fact, be decrypted. Miller's is the universe of the butterfly effect, where intimately minor events in one continent have seismic consequences in another. She knows what is at stake in the infinitesimal, the split second, the infra-thin.The poems in her scintillating collection, Nowhere Nearer, make us aware of how precarious the earth's crust is, how treacherous the ambient oceans can be, and how ephemeral we ourselves are as we traverse great distances through the air.'
Ranjit Hoskote

Alice Miller is a Berlin-based New Zealand poet. She is the author of 'The Limits' (Shearsman & Auckland University Press). Alice is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her work has appeared in 'Boston Review', 'Oxford Poetry', 'Poetry London', 'The Rialto', and 'The American Scholar'. She has received the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award, the Royal Society of NZ Manhire Prize, a Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship, and has travelled l³*