Olympic, by John L. Miller, is a dynamic collection of personal, persona, and pandemic poems inspired by various Greek mythological tales, guided by Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths. Throughout the book, John Miller masterfully employs this mythology as a creative vehicle to both witness and contemplate the current realities of life against a backdrop of history and legend.

Olympic offers a vision of the past enfolded into our burgeoning future, in the form of the intimate whisper of a secret witness to the inner lives of the gods who happens to have a time machine, allowing the poet and his readers to slip through a portal to Ancient Greece and back again, sometimes before we’ve reached the end of a single line of poetry. -Christopher Luna, Clark County, WA Poet Laureate 2013-2017

Through the lens of Greek mythology, John Miller questions the assumptions and realities of today’s world. The answers are sometimes clear; often the reader is left to contemplate the meaning of the silence after his questions have been put, a silence as resonant as that after a bell has been struck. There is pleasure aplenty in these troubling, lyrical, and probing poems. -Bruce Parker, author of Ramadan in Summer