Can You Smell the Rain? cover image

Can You Smell the Rain?

$14.95

Poems by Patricia Cleary Miller
Foreword by H.L. Nix
120 pages
July 2020
978-1-943491-21-6 (paper)

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Can You Smell the Rain? poses the old theatrical question, Who wants what, and why can’t they have it? Her confused characters take themselves seriously as they yearn for love. With wit and gently biting satire, the poet presents their struggles. Beware: a snicker at these characters is a snicker at yourself. Poet Mia Leonin writes, “Miller’s rapturous attention to detail and her deft sense of story conjure a poetic genealogy, swirling and swooning with ancestors, lovers, and earthly delights.” Poet H. L. Hix writes in his foreword, “This is a lyric memoir lush with vivid and vivifying particulars the objects of a lifetime.” Whether the scene is a French-speaking convent school in Kansas City or an Irish-American woman’s further coming of age as a Radcliffe student, wife, mother, poet, or world traveler, Miller’s true journey is an interior one marked by a radiant wit and a sensuous appreciation for life itself.

Patricia Cleary Miller is professor emerita of English at Rockhurst University, where she founded and edited the Rockhurst Review. She is the author of Starting a Swan Dive (Daniel L. Brenner Award) from BkMk Press, as well as the poetry titles Dresden and Crimson Lights, and the nonfiction title Westport: Missouri’s Port of Many Returns. Her work has appeared in Stand, Connecticut Review, New Letters, Cottonwood, I-70 Review, and elsewhere. She won a Pushcart Prize for one of the poems in Can You Smell the Rain? Her secondary school was the French Convent of Notre Dame de Sion.

She is a graduate of Radcliffe College (where she also held a Bunting fellowship), the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and the University of Kansas. For eight years she was poet laureate of the Harvard Alumni Association. She is a past president of the Writers Place and won its annual Muse Award.

“Miller’s rapturous attention to detail and her deft sense of story conjure a poetic genealogy, swirling and swooning with ancestors, lovers, and earthly delights.”
—Mia Leonin

“The poem ‘How Long’ beautifully expresses a lost love affair in sensual detail. A poem about Chinese foot binding again conveys the pain of accommodating ourselves to love. A Burberry raincoat becomes a poor substitute for youth and love affairs. ‘Mother is Scrubbing Her Floors’ brings us back (as many of her poems do) to the roles assigned to women, the immersion in those roles, and the subsequent loss of self.”
—Seattle Book Review

Distributed for BkMk Press.