In Float, Wendy Miles excavates place and memory in search of what "will not be called a ghost for many years." Her sacred elegies unearth relationships to mine their links: a bird is a girl "pleading for mouth aflame," a cat is a mother, "face streaked behind a roof of hands," and a father is a redbud, yielding "to the hush, the barest pink light." At the center: the tether of suffering to love.-Allison Wilkins, author of Girl Who
Float is a remarkable debut collection filled with vital, visceral imagery and fully formed within the fractured and yet unclouded syntax of remembrance. I was held throughout by its pulse and the cleaving resonance of its crafted language. Miles gives us lines taut as thread wound around a finger, so that wherever the speaker of these poems points our attention, a heartbeat is always present.-Jon Pineda, author of Let's No One Get Hurt