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Impossible Things
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Miller Oberman
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2024
About this book
Offering an intimate account of intergenerational grief, Miller Oberman’s new collection of poetry, Impossible Things, explores his experiences as both a transgender child and father. Oberman weaves in passages from his own deceased father’s unpublished memoir to engage with the mysterious drowning of his eldest brother, Joshua, at age two, a tragedy that cast a shadow over his childhood. He depicts his own youth and parenthood in the context of his father’s trauma, employing queer and trans theory and experimental poetic forms to challenge and expand discourse around fatherhood and masculinity. Oberman moves beyond an attempt to solve the mystery of Joshua’s death and interrogates how much we can ever know about our forebears or understand their impacts on our lives. Impossible Things offers a necessary intervention into the well-worn terrain of fatherhood/boyhood memoir and functions as a living elegy, communicating with the past, the dead, and the unknowable while speaking to the possibilities for healing intergenerational trauma.
Author / Editor information
Miller Oberman is Director of First Year Writing at Eugene Lang College, The New School, and author of The Unstill Ones: Poems.
Reviews
“In this compelling extended elegy, Miller Oberman captures both the possible and Impossible Things of a young child’s death and its effect on a family. I’ve been an admirer of Miller’s poetry since I first read ‘Joshua Was Gone,’ a masterly and devastating poem that embodies the heart and craft of this deeply moving book. Honoring both what’s missing and what remains, Impossible Things is a stunning book you will want to read, reread and keep close.”
-- Ellen Bass, author of Indigo
"Impossible Things is, at its heart, a book-length elegy—it endeavors to speak with the dead so that the writer might go on living. To do so, Miller Oberman enacts a trans poetics that insists that an adequate description of everyday life requires admitting what is spectral, impossible, and not (yet) properly named. Anyway, I love these poems. They are tender and funny and charmingly neurotic. They are hurt and hurting, but not moralizing. They surface and bear contraction. They make me, somehow, alive."
-- Cameron Awkward-Rich, author of The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment
"There is so much to admire in Oberman’s book—the way the father is never demonized, the frankness with which Oberman copes with his own early gender confusion and resulting abuse at the hands of other children, and the tenderness with which he writes about his transition to adulthood and his own children. The book is a breviary of pain and forgiveness."
-- Lisa Russ Spaar The Adroit Journal
-- Lisa Russ Spaar The Adroit Journal
"In his book-length elegy Impossible Things, trans poet Miller Oberman explores 'intergenerational grief,' from the perspectives of being a trans child and a father, incorporating his late father’s unpublished memoir. The result is a deeply personal examination of the impacts of family and loss."
-- Gregg Shapiro OutSFL
-- Gregg Shapiro OutSFL
"The inability to truly know our parents is a ripe concept in literature, something timeless that most of us can relate to. Through drawing himself closer to his father in Impossible Things, Oberman offers the reader a chance to do the same as they read along, to ask questions there might not have been a time and place for while parents were alive, to tell stories that are not our own but which we are very much a part of, and to find parallels."
-- Alex DiFrancesco Chicago Review of Books
-- Alex DiFrancesco Chicago Review of Books
"While his musings are tentative, careful, Oberman’s images are crisp and vivid. . . . Oberman crafts a shared disconnection, one that reverberates throughout."
-- Turi Sioson Only Poems
-- Turi Sioson Only Poems
Topics
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Frontmatter
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Contents
ix -
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Dedications
xiii -
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Prologue: Two Lunches with my Father
xv -
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All These Beloved Books
1 -
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Memoir I
2 -
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Joshua Was Gone
3 -
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Memoir II
6 -
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The Wind Is Loud
7 -
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Memoir III
8 -
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Memoir IIIi
9 -
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Memoir IIIii
10 -
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The Pool, 2019
11 -
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Memoir IV
13 -
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Proper Identification
14 -
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Joy
16 -
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“ if this was a different kind of story id tell you about the sea”
17 -
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Memoir V
19 -
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Taharah
20 -
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Memoir VI
21 -
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Twenty-three Facts about Joshua’s Death
22 -
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Memoir VII
23 -
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Dear Mr. Pennypacker
24 -
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Commas
25 -
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Joshua’s Birthday
26 -
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Pottstown Mercury, 1972
28 -
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Memoir VIII
30 -
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Memoir IX
31 -
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Memoir IXi
32 -
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History of Fingers
33 -
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Odo
36 -
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Theory
38 -
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Phoenixville, 2020
41 -
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The Centaur
43 -
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Giant Bird
44 -
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Memoir X
46 -
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On Similes
47 -
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Comes With
48 -
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Two Photographs
50 -
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Memoir XI
51 -
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Memoir XII
52 -
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Memoir XIIi
53 -
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The Field
54 -
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You Are a Field of Little
62 -
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Memoir XIII
63 -
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Memoir XIV
64 -
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This and That at the Frick
65 -
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How to Sleep
66 -
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Memoir XV
67 -
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Memoir XVi
69 -
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Catskills Poem
70 -
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The Camels
71 -
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Memoir XVI
72 -
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Two Shabbats with Paul Celan
73 -
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Memoir XVII
75 -
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Northport
76 -
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Syntax, 2022
78 -
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Joanne Dies, 2017
79 -
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Memoir XVIII
80 -
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Jewish Cento, 1957
81 -
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Epilogue: Mensch
84 -
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Memoir Cento
87 -
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Memoir Cento i
90 -
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Memoir Cento ii
92 -
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The Cake
94 -
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Notes on the origin and sources of the poems
97 -
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Acknowledgments
101
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
October 30, 2024
eBook ISBN:
9781478060086
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9781478060086
Keywords for this book
Poetry; transgender; masculinity; trauma; fatherhood; parenting; Jewish identity
Audience(s) for this book
For a non-specialist adult audience
