In a city awake on tea and subtitles, / the freshman boys fight off sleep / to hear a bluesman sing at the corner club – so begins Michael Miller’s College Town, which served as the title poem for his first book and now provides the title phrase for this retrospective collection. Miller, a former Los Angeles Times journalist and organizer for years of the Muckenthaler Cultural Center’s poetry series, published his first poem, Elegy for a Rhythm Guitarist, in 1999 in the UCI literary journal Faultline. That effort appears in this collection along with 49 other poems, including the Pushcart Prize nominees The Pool Coach Sings Hallelujah and Crossing, Harpers Ferry, the never-published-in-book-form The Beatles at 80, and three pieces – December,
Museum of Tolerance and Blues Man – that are spotlighted on the Poetry Foundation’s website. The newest poem here, also making its book debut, is Ofrenda for John Gardiner, a tribute to the Southern California poet who died in 2017. In addition to the poems, Tea and Subtitles features a cover by the author’s brother, artist Chris Miller, and a foreword by Alabama Poet Laureate Jennifer Horne.