Olympic

"Olympic offers a vision of the past enfolded into our burgeoning future, in the form of the intimate whisper of a secret witness to the inner lives of the gods who happens to have a time machine, allowing the poet and his readers to slip through a portal to Ancient Greece and back again, sometimes before we've reached the end of a single line of poetry."

-Christopher Luna, Clark County, WA Poet Laureate 2013-2017

and author of Exchanging Wisdom: A Guide for Parents of the Autonomous.

"Olympic captivates with poetry of Greek mythology; in the voices of deities, different views of the myths, and parallels between them and current, real-life happenings and contemplations. As in the poem "The Wedding of Perseus and Andromeda," the voice is hers, Forgive me, I say to him-/ it may be too long before I feel. John Miller has a gentle way to invite the reader to ponder vulnerabilities alongside him. John's writing holds great depths and layers as in "Perseus" "why anyone believes the future/belongs to them/must make the gods laugh." In the poem "Icarus," John asks, Have I gone along too far, too high,/ too late see in a sun the price of missing/what could be asked, what could be given? This collection serves as an incredible and indirect view of hard truths anyone can ask themselves."

-Rebecca Smolen, author of Excoriation and Womanhood and Other Scars

"Through the lens of Greek mythology, John Miller questions the assumptions and realities of today's world. The answers are sometimes clear; often the reader is left to contemplate the meaning of the silence after his questions have been put, a silence as resonant as that after a bell has been struck. There is pleasure aplenty in these troubling, lyrical, and probing poems."

-Bruce Parker, author of Ramadan in Summer