Jesse Millner
Jesse Millner’s poems have appeared in River Styx, Pearl, The Prose Poem Project, Grist, The Florida Review, Juxta Prose and other literary magazines. His poem, “In Praise of Small Gods,” was selected for inclusion in The Best American Poetry 2013, and his flash piece, “Last Night I Dreamed” was featured in Best Small Fictions 2020. He has published seven poetry chapbooks and three full-length collections, The Neighborhoods of My Past Sorrow (winner of bronze medal in 2010 Florida Book Awards, Kitsune Books 2009), Dispatches from the Department of Supernatural Explanation(Kitsune Books 2012) and Memory’s Blue Sedan (Hysterical Books 2020).
GINA by JESSE MILLNER
$12
Jesse Millner’s Gina is a fever dream of poems that ricochet from the speaker’s childhood to adulthood, from Florida to New Mexico, from earth to space, from hunger to pizza, from Chicago taverns to the foamy Pacific--all beginning with the memory of Gina and a moment of dizzying, transcendent grace.
In these beautifully-modulated, tender and terrifying poems, Jesse Millner challenges us to feel more acutely, to see more viscerally, and to honor the vicissitudes and confusions of the inner life without pretense or self-inflation. Wildly imagined and solidly grounded, the poems in Gina feel simultaneously brand-new and ancient, like half-remembered dreams or our own half-forgotten lives. That is to say, they have the feeling of brand-new ancient memories. When this poet says he is “hungry for more constant light,” we believe him, and grow hungry ourselves. He’s not playing games. This is real. -Michael Hettich, author of A Sharper Silence