Paradise and Other Lost Places

My review of a great poetry book by Jim Miller, plus a new interview link

Time for a timely book review. This particular title is poetry, which I read often but have never reviewed before. Honestly, I simply haven’t felt compelled until now. But this new collection of poems is one of the best I’ve read. Yeah, you heard me right—one of the best. The book is Paradise and Other Lost Places: Poetry by Jim Miller

Jim Miller is a teacher, writer, labor activist and historian, father, husband, journalist, and so much more. I enjoyed, learned from, and recommended both of his early novels, Drift and Flash, but I especially loved Last Days in Ocean Beach. In fact, that slim but “heavy” novel is one of the best of all the set-in-San Diego books I know.

Speaking of literature in San Diego, Jim Miller wrote a great piece on the subject the other day in the Jumping-Off Place here on Substack. If you like to read about authors and books, I predict you’ll enjoy the read. I’m lucky enough to be surrounded and supported by, and to support—sometimes virtually, sometimes in person—a great group of SoCal writers, most but not all of whom are based in San Diego. But clearly this town is not as well-represented in literature as a city of its size should be.

Many of the poems in Jim Miller’s new book are set in places I know well, the beaches and streets and the “ordinary” San Diego neighborhoods like Golden Hill. But his poems span the geography of Miller’s life, so their lines include references to Hawaii, Arizona, Illinois, and nameless places around the west and across the country. It is American writing in the best sense of the word, full of bitter disappointment and despair, but lit by gratitude for our daily blessings, and sustained by a painful hope.

I first opened Paradise and Other Lost Places early in March, after a whirlwind of travel, teaching bouts, and family visits that left my head spinning and my heart aching. My friend Lisa had handed me the book and said read this with an urgency I seldom see in her, so I put the slim volume in my luggage and took it home. There, I read the poems slowly, one or two a day, like a chocolate connoisseur with a treasured one-pound box doling out a daily treat to herself, and just finished the book last week. The poems were sustenance, yes, but more than that, they were a confirmation and a testament to the everyday beauty of life, and the joys of love, both romantic and familial.

As my subscribers here know, I lost some close friends in the last year, and I’ve been feeling bruised and vulnerable and mortal. Miller recently survived a close brush with death, in fact he thought he might die in the hospital, during his final surgery at the end of a horrific health crisis. Perhaps because of that, his was exactly the right voice for me to hear this spring. His poems were prayers which I mumbled to myself like little locker-room pep talks to the battered team inside me. “Come on, guys, there’s another half to play. We can still go out there and surprise them all yet."

The sports metaphor is fitting, since Miller is a fan of team sports—football, basketball, and, I think most of all, baseball. I am a big baseball fan as you all probably know by now, and his words sunk in deeply, rapidly, stealing home at some primal level. I’ll give you just one example, from a poem called “Spring Training”:

All the meaningless rituals

that are never enough—

tapping cleats with the bat

between pitches,

stepping out of the box,

trying to decipher the signs.

All this beauty and life on the pages would be enough to make this book of poetry a keeper, but there’s something more that makes it incredibly timely right now—Miller sees and celebrates working people. Like me, he grew up playing sports and working hard, and he’s never lost his appreciation for a job well done, whether the person is a car mechanic, construction worker, musician, food server, teacher, or bartender. But his respect for the worker doesn’t blind him to what has been stolen from us all—the dignity of being able to support ourselves and our families through diligent effort. He points out what we’d all prefer to look away from—the unhoused, the struggling, the barely-making-it, the beggar, the untimely dead.

Paradise and Other Lost Places will be shelved with my favorites poets, the modern geniuses like Mary Oliver, Ada Limón, Robert Blanco, Ross Gay, and alongside local hero Steve Kowit. I hope you’ll treat yourself to a copy and maybe get one for a friend. You can order the book anywhere, or you may choose to order it from Sunbelt, and support two small businesses—it was published by the all-volunteer non-profit San Diego City Works Press, whose books are distributed by Sunbelt—with a click.

In related news, Russel and I will take to the streets again tomorrow, armed with our “Hands Off!” sign; we’ll make our voices heard and enjoy communing with other like-minded Americans who care about this country and all of the people in it, and who don’t want our democracy to devolve into a crappy heartless business like those touted by the people running the current administration.

The other day a short interview with Yours Truly came out on Voyage LA, an online magazine celebrating creative Angelenos. This is the third of three interviews that I have gotten in to “print” by following up on an interview I saw with Judy Reeves in 2023. None of it cost me a penny. All it took was reaching out, following up, and being persistent. Who knows how many people have seen these interviews, or the many others I have done? All I know is that my book continues to sell, and I haven’t bought any of the social media ads so many authors buy, because they are told they “have to.”

Speaking of book marketing, I’ll be teaching a class called Marketing on a Shoestring on May 18th at 2:30 pm, as part of the San Diego Writers, Ink, Spring Into Writing weekend. It is three days of classes, all pay what you can (it is a fundraiser so we instructors all donate our time). Find out more about the weekend and my class here.

Here’s a screenshot of the Voyage LA interview page. As always, I am so lucky to have Russel as my in-house photographer; he keeps me in publish-ready photographs like this, which was taken in 2019 in the clubhouse at beautiful Southwestern Yacht Club.

That’s all for this week.

Hasta pronto!