“These poems are frighteningly sensual—frightening because they introduce themselves as broken, timid, sometimes even wan. But once inside this ‘species,’ things get quickly hot. Little is spared this poet’s charged capacity to feel. A coffee mug becomes ‘a small ceramic giver,’ the human hand its taker-lover. The sexual tensions of dating are measured in bulbs, dull or scorching. Wolves, rats, goats and worms pulse through this collection, offering unintentionally erotic ways to feel and devour feeling. Erin Miller’s inscape is not one of despair. It is a terrain of post-explosive love. All those scattered body parts? ‘The pink sky, a mouth’? They’re not lamenting; they’re resting. They’re steaming. They’re in the scattering together, and together, share the ‘subtle violence of waking.’ This is accidental eros, the very best kind.”
—LARISSA SZPORLUK, author of Virginals

“‘What truth defines me as I am right now? What thing begs creating?’ These are the two central questions at the heart of Miller’s unflinchingly intimate debut. Part fever dream, part clear-eyed self-reflection, Miller’s collection feels like stepping into a hall of mirrors, each of our many selves—our inner species—on full display. It’s an ‘unforgiving craft’ to interrogate who we are, what we do, and how and why we love—to admit we ‘have been loving in the wrong way for a long time.’ But this is Miller‘s gift to—and for—us: These intricate and haunting poems that lure us to the corners of our body we didn’t know existed, that seduce us into realizing what a ‘sharp pleasure’ it is to be ‘imprecise in [our] own jungle.’”
—ANNA ROSE WELCH, author of We, the Almighty Fires

“‘Sometimes, even the worst thing about you wants / to be found,’ writes Erin Miller, and in Inner Species, that worst thing is feral, elemental. But these poems announce a new poetics of becoming, where transformation and emergence are necessary conditions of the human animal. Ravishing and brutal in equal measure, Inner Species held me captive like a snarling wolf guarding the sole exit from a cave—its presence fierce, but the light it let in dazzling. Miller’s debut is ‘a sharp-toothed reminder’ that we will be exposed and vulnerable before we can take our final forms.”
—ROSS WHITE, author of Charm Offensive

ERIN L. MILLER is a poet working in tech. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at Bowling Green State University. Her poetry and reviews have appeared in Best New Poets, The Pinch, Whiskey Island, Bluestem, Black Warrior Review, and others. She co-hosts the Chime In open mic and lives in Durham, North Carolina.