SEASON OF THE BODY

Bellingham Review editor Miller’s debut essays are elegant examples of life considered not theatrically or oppressively, but as a glistening, sensuous, and respectful tracking of intentions and acts.

These 22 reflective pieces have an admirable fearlessness in roving about the palpable connections in life. These can be between lovers, friends, and families, can be about the hours given to—or exacted by—melancholy, or given to bliss or to the fading of relationships (“two people begin to misplace the selves they have formed over the years”) or to love (“to probe that scared flesh and not hate each other for it”). Miller is not a minimalist, but she also doesn’t stand a lot of clutter and appreciates delicacy, as when your lover asks how many came before: “You must analyze the question carefully, because a correct answer does exist, in the air between you.” This is not coyness—Miller is never coy—but the taking of an artful, chess-like enjoyment. At other times, without slipping her moorings, the author moves into stormy reaches. “We sleep alone but something musses our hair in the night, strokes us into dishevelment, so in the morning our mirrors give back a person foreign and wild.” Miller takes enough chances, for there are inevitably to be jarring notes, as in the comparison of writers to masseurs, both “requiring the same inclination to listen with a hand pressed to the holy bone,” an awkward glancing reach. But playing in the fields of the emotions through the electricity of touch, she is finely tuned. She volunteers to be with newborns struggling through all sorts of ailments; “it’s a moment of simple communication,” she says, but readers will experience it as sublime, so holy does the writer cradling the child in her arms feel.

Miller knows how to let physical exploration of touch, comforting to intimate, pierce but not smother.