Overtime

Overtime, Joseph Millar's first book of poetry, both traditionally elegiac and formally unexpected--aims at the overlap between art and the everyday grind of work and single fatherhood. Here we find poems of loss and grief, alongside poems of working-class celebration that hum with the sound of wind in the ladder racks and miles of telephone wire. Overtime is a book of poetry whose chief concern is not art for its own sake but rather the artistic visions the everyday struggles of life provide when paid the right attention. A poet deeply sunk into William Carlos Williams' American Grain, Millar grounds his poems in the details and small mysteries of everyday life and labor. Whether the speaker is murmuring a song to the beloved in poems like "Love Pirates" or "Listener," imagining the travails of a Native American war chief in "Sitting Bull in Canada," or considering his own inevitable death in "Heart Attack," Millar tells a story plainly, moving from lyric to narrative and back again in language charged with duende and force. As Yusef Komunyakaa has written, "Millar is a poet we can believe."