New Women's Voices The Pocket Museum of Natural History

In Michele M Miller's debut chapbook of poetry, The Pocket Museum of Natural History, she holds up an assortment of artifacts-from insects and animals, eggs, bones, and fossils, to rotting potatoes, a sharp bit of glass and a two-headed calf-asking us to examine the physical and mortal worlds in their transformations, and the sacred found in the mundane. Here Miller explores the intersections between nature, science, personal experience, and ephemeral moments of wonder, love, and loss. A poetic cabinet of curiosities, in this curated collection every poem offers its own type of specimen-the material, the intimate, the beautiful, the transient, and in some cases, the brutal-for observation and contemplation. Accompanying notes offer the reader enlightening information on the poems' subjects and artifacts. With finely cut language and a lyrical, sometimes unsettling tone, these poems hold close the interconnected meanings of objects and the living in a universe composed of impermanence.