TRANSITIONAL OBJECTS by Claire Millikin

Movies, haircuts, forests, backroads, pottery, photographs, jewelry, birds: the objects that make up and are discarded in the process of a life are the transient, mournfully held subjects of Transitional Objects. The book is bound as four booklets: Straight Line, Film, Fakes, and Vanishing Point, encouraging readers to experience the narrative of Transitional Objects as fluent and shifting. It is the objects, the places where a life is held and the places that a life holds, that create this haunting and spare poetry of vision and touch.

PRAISE FOR THE POETRY OF CLAIRE MILLIKIN

“Claire Millikin has made her own persistent music of a fully felt, fully experienced life in which ‘what's broken never heals completely.’ Often edging into what seems unspeakable, she finds a language that remains plain, steady, scrupulous, unsentimental and unshowy. Poem after poem registers the poet’s ‘battle for the moral world’—illuminating not only a single life but its human and environmental surroundings.”
EAMON GRENNAN, author of Still Life with Waterfall

“Claire Millikin’s lines condense paradoxical and painful experience into glittering musical constellations—an expressionist torrent, informed by a neoclassical taste for symmetry and keen closure. Defying all jurisdiction, her lyrics evade their own meticulous borders, and reach with astonishing poignance into a zone of pure, lancing attestation: the Cassandra-clarity of soulful witness.”
WAYNE KOESTENBAUM, author of Camp Marmalade

CLAIRE MILLIKIN is the author of seven books of poetry, including State Fair Animals (Unicorn Press, 2018). She is a 2021 recipient of the Maine Literary Award, and teaches art history and American Studies at the University of Maine, at Bates College, and for the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. Millikin lives in coastal Maine.