Club Icarus

Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, 2012

With muscular language and visceral imagery, Club Icarus will appeal to sons and fathers, to those tired of poetry that makes no sense, to those who think lyric poetry is dead, to those who think the narrative poem is stale, and to those who appreciate the vernacular as the language of living and the act of living as something worth putting into language.

"A down-to-earth intelligence and an acute alertness to the gritty movement of language are what you'll treasure most in Matt Miller's Club Icarus. You just might pass this book on to a friend or relative who needs it, or even better yet, purchase their own copy."-Major Jackson, author of Holding Company and judge

"In Matt Miller's deeply satisfying collection, there is a visceral longing that cannot be ignored, a surrender to the body's fate but also a warring against it. There is the tenacious blood-grief for the lost father but also the deeply abiding yet fearful love of the new father. At the heart of these wonderful poems is a naked wrestling with all those forces that both wither life and give it bloom, those that rob us and those that save us."-Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog

"In a stunning array throughout Matt W. Miller's remarkable Club Icarus are instances of the kind of poetic alchemy that coaxes beauty and a rather severe grace out of the most obdurate materials and unlikely contexts. Here is a poet in whose artful hands language has become an instrument that enables us to know the world again and, simultaneously, as if for the first time."-B. H. Fairchild, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry

"In Club Icarus the universal themes of birth and death, love and loss-are woven together with a luminous, transcendent brush. This book is a sly and beautiful performance."-Marilyn Chin, author of Rhapsody in Plain Yellow

MATT W. MILLER was born and grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts. He earned degrees at Yale, where he also played varsity football, and from Emerson College. He has published poems in Slate, Harvard Review, Third Coast, and other journals and in his first book, Cameo Diner. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Miller teaches English and coaches football at Philips Exeter Academy. He lives in Exeter, New Hampshire, with his family.