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STATE FAIR ANIMALS by Claire Millikin



About this edition:
Poetry, 109 pages. 5.625" x 8.250" softcover, Smyth-sewn binding.
ISBN 978-0-87775-028-4. Released 15 November 2018.

About this edition:
Poetry, 109 pages. 5.750" x 8.500" hardcover, Smyth-sewn binding.
ISBN 978-0-87775-029-1. With dust jacket. Released 15 November 2018.

About this edition:
Poetry, 109 pages. 5.750" x 8.500" hardcover, Smyth-sewn binding.
ISBN 978-0-87775-029-1. With dust jacket. Released 15 November 2018.

“Claire Millikin’s lines condense paradoxical and painful experience into glittering musical constellations—an expressionist torrent, informed by a neoclassical taste for symmetry and keen closure. Defying all jurisdiction, her lyrics evade their own meticulous borders, and reach with astonishing poignance into a zone of pure, lancing attestation: the Cassandra-clarity of soulful witness.” —WAYNE KOESTENBAUM, author of Camp Marmalade

From State Fair Animals:

FOX

Eyes first were water,
a patterned depth and appetite,
but the water moved, drawn toward light,
pain of emersion.

The fox crossed the street rapidly before me in thin snow.
I did not step back or flee or slow down;
I remember the cups of eyes,
darkness that does not back away.

Emersion—cells that would become eyes worked upward;
and it was pain that transfixed them,
transfiguration of light
into form. Light, for fire is its cause, must always be violent
and when the fox tore into traffic

without averted eyes, I watched the red
of the animal quickening, transfigured through flight.

I have only the key to this one door
of my eyes but it works like a wonder
endowing me all things visible.

When the car broke down, at the end of childhood, we ran across
eight lanes of the Bronx Expressway, swerving
corridors of escape.


With family roots in Georgia, CLAIRE MILLIKIN grew up in Georgia, North Carolina, and overseas. She graduated from Yale with a degree in Philosophy, and later earned her doctorate in English literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has worked as a janitor, a waitress, and a copywriter, and now teaches as a lecturer in Art History at the University of Virginia. Before coming to Charlottesville, she lived for many years in rural coastal Maine. She is the author of four full-length books of poems including Television, which was a finalist for the Maine Literary Award in Poetry, Motels Where We Lived, After Houses—Poetry for the Homeless, and Museum of Snow, as well as a chapbook of poems, The Gleaners.