Unless I Came Back to Tell You

The beating of wings, fragments memory leaves--each word, each phrase draws us toward the sun: "I fly too high, / the sky there uncluttered by restraint.// I am torched/ I am metal I melt. I am molten. Unless I Came Back to Tell You soars, plummets, burns images into skin, remakes space into breath, turns a colon into a challenge, a cottonmouth into a river. Self is "a cave, a white cloud, an open mouth." We "Start with a word watch it grow. From a stitch, to a sting, to a sudden snake..." What an astonishment this collection is!

-Susan Roney-O'Brien, author of Thira, Bone Circle and Legacy of the Last World, Recipient of the 2020 Stanley Kunitz Medal

These poems pull you in, as good poems do, to a world not unlike Brueghel's painting in which workers plow on blithely unaware while Icarus falls unseen through the sky. Versions of Icarus appear repeatedly in these poems through "rib-crack" memories, "always falling from a certain-to-be-fatal height/or else immersing into treacherous and deep waters," even, in a brilliant poem, helplessly witnessing the falling of a beloved poet, as if in slow motion. The great achievement here lies in Milligan's strength and control in capturing our capacity for
resilience, for seeking beauty, the way mockingbirds hammer at their reflections "in hope enough pain ruptures the world to an open window again."

-John Hodgen, Winner of the AWP Prize in Poetry

Unless I Came Back to Tell You walks the sharp and subtle landscapes of science, mythology, and the natural world. Milligan shines a hard light on the shadows of humanity in a series of implied and hemmed-in traumas told in lyrical snapshots both ghastly and gorgeous. There is an immediacy and darkness in these poems-reading feels like waking from a jarring dream, left with the deciphering of pulled-apart memory and reality.

-Andrea Janna, editor of Visitant Literary