What Fire

Alice Miller is a writer from Aotearoa New Zealand living in Berlin. She is the author of three previous poetry collections and a novel. Her collection Nowhere Nearer (Pavilion, 2018) was a PBS Recommendation and her novel about Georgie Yeats, More Miracle than Bird (Tin House, 2020) was a New York Times summer selection. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the International Institute of Modern Letters, Alice is currently on the faculty of the MFA programme at Cedar Crest College.

'You can write pessimistically but still produce great poetry. That's the message to take from Alice Miller's third collection, What Fire. The title poem is a nightmarish fantasia, with sinister overtones of "night and fog" resonating with recent European history. As with much of Miller's work, it is both chastening and brilliant.'Nicholas Reid, The New Zealand Listener