Chloe Yelena Miller's PERFORATED

Chloe is a good friend and poet. Her second book PERFORATED marks an advance over her first VIABLE. The strengths of the first are still present in the second: an intimate but unassuming voice, an observant tenderness towards self and others, the willingness to broach difficult subjects. In the second book, the personal references widen out into the world. The Italian touchstones are handled with greater range and depth. My favorites in this regard are the opening poem "Pantheon," which ends distinctively yet inclusively in the way an Italian dialect "relies on the plural/ second person, voi," and the poem "Etruscan Bronzes," concludes soberly about the transience of youth:

These bronze figures,
from their height of youth,
artist's hand concealed
by the smoothing of time,
gaze upon a far-off horizon
long buried.

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