“The difficult grace of dailiness and the defiant resilience of the spirit have always been at the heart of Millar’s poetry. Book by book, line by carefully carved line, Millar has been writing the finest poetry about work and material presence in our world since those of his exemplar, Philip Levine. Millar’s elemental belief in those around him, an unfailing tenderness, and his fabulous jazz-inflected diction are the polishes by which the American grain of these poems is made luminous. Read this book; watch it shine.”

David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour

"Joseph Millar possesses a lyric intelligence that exalts the quotidian, that’s deeply humane. His poems track and transfigure friendship, old age, silence, and love’s effervescent intimacies. But his lyricism, his language, doesn’t enlarge the distance between what’s observed and the self; instead, it brings the world closer to the body. All that blossoms, all that decays surrounds the speaker in these poems. Millar trusts poetry to reveal something vital. After reading this book, I trust him and his poems."

Eduardo Corral, author of Slow Lightning and Guillotine

"What Joe Millar’s carefully wrought and elegantly shaped poems remind us in their sonic beauty and power, is that the rhyme is a kind of reassurance of grace, a surprising harmony that arrives with the sense of rightful order in a world of mortal chaos and emotional shadows. These poems shine for their splendid engineering, machines much like the new stars of his title poem, that keep 'shining on life and death.'"

Kwame Dawes, author of Sturge Town, Norton 2024