“Claire Millikin’s Nightlight is a haunting that echoes back into the past and stretches down towards Virginia and Georgia. The poems in this collection rustle up ghosts in landscapes and interiors, giving voice and shape to historical traumas, personal and collective. Millikin weaves together histories and that are also secrets, seamlessly stitching them in the voices of her childhood and her family. Nightlight is a tapestry of interwoven lineages of racism, southern whiteness, the horrors of American slavery and genocide of the Mvskoke people, and the devastation of gender-based violence. This collection is painful, yes, but it is also full up with resonant truth. ”
SAMAA ABDURRAQIB, author of Towards A Retreat

“In Nightlight, Claire Millikin writes from inside the American South, where collective history and personal pain are inseparable. Here, Confederate memory surfaces as daily encounter: the comfort of monuments, the honor of violence, and pastoral landscapes that cannot be swept away. These poems understand the South as a place built on secrets, where we hope to see clearly through a dirty mirror even as history insists on another truth. Refusing nostalgia or easy absolution, this collection offers an honest reckoning with what has been buried, misnamed, or passed down intact. Millikin reminds us what it means to love the places that taught us to look away. These poems do not offer rescue; instead, they lead us purposefully into the red clay dark and promise to leave the light on.”
ASHLEY LUMPKIN, author of The Sad Stays

“In these troubled times we need books like Nightlight to illuminate the damage our culture has done to us and through us, books that view our private wounds through a larger historical lens. That is what these beautiful and measured poems accomplish, as Claire Millikin explores her deep Southern roots—‘a buried stream dangerous and nourishing.’ While she honors those roots, she also grieves the fact that the soil they were planted in belonged to others who were driven out, thus leaving her ‘a thief’s inheritance.’ She uses a series of epigraphs, from Thomas Jefferson to Berry Gordy, to widen the cultural context of the poems. But it’s the poems themselves that make the textures palpable, make the pines, the voices, the cruelties and ghosts so compelling. Shifting between personal and historical lenses, the poems reckon with the sexual and racial violence embedded in Southern culture. If grief’s work includes ‘picking up spare wreckage,’ these poems make that work profound and luminous. This is a brilliant and necessary book.”
BETSY SHOLL, author of As if a Song Could Save You

CLAIRE MILLIKIN is the author of ten poetry collections, including Magicicada, a book about juvenile solitary confinement and winner of the 2024 Foreword Indies Award for Poetry. Millikin’s recognitions also include a Charles Simic Poetry Prize, Editor’s Choice; the Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize; and the W.B. Yeats’ Society Poetry Prize. Originally from Georgia (USA), Millikin teaches art history for the University of Maine system and for the Maine Media Workshops and College. Millikin lives in coastal Maine.