Chloe Yelena Miller launches "Perforated," w/ Amy Shearn

Chloe will be joined by writer Amy Shearn for a reading, conversation and Q&A, followed by a reception and signing.

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Chloe Yelena Miller’s second full-length poetry collection, Perforated, is about the grief of private and public losses. Architecture and light frame loss through the lens of motherhood, mortality and love from the United States to Italy.

Covid, immigration, climate change and school shootings sound alarms in Perforated. Woven through the collection is “New York City,” a long poem broken into smaller pieces reflecting on 9/11 as it continues to reverberate in the author’s life. Public events transform into private experiences as the narrator searches for strength.

English and Italian Vocabulary poems, a series that began in Miller’s first book, Viable (Lily Poetry Review Books 2021) and chapbook, Unrest (Finishing Line Press, 2013) explore how language can structure emotions. In “English Vocabulary: To Mourn,” Miller asks, “What if mourning is my engine?” She remembers relatives and loved ones who have died, working to undo mortality through memory.

Miller reflects on her family’s Italian origins and her time in Italy. As the final poem, “Palimpsest,” offers, we can make our worlds visible through art and light as we build upon the past. We are mortal and fragile, but we can remember each other and persist.

Advanced Praise

"I write around the center" Chloe Yelena Miller pens in "Ars Poetica or Pesca Tabacchiera" from her tender and poignant second collection, Perforated. Miller’s poems explore the invisible and visible ties of family and love that bind us; aided by her assured tone and gentle pace, the work blossoms on the page, inviting the reader to witness an intimate conversation with a child or to learn Italian vocabulary. Miller has created a collection that sparkles with a shared humanity, generational wisdom, and hope. —Teri Ellen Cross Davis, author of a more perfect Union and Haint

Chloe Yelena Miller’s Perforated offers us intimate, confiding poems that ask us to lean closer. “Can you keep a secret?” the poems say. This is a book of lost friendships and lost loves, the world an “Ever rotating exhibit of light and dark,” the regrets we have decades later over “what can go wrong / without the right words.” Throughout, the speaker—always a mother who fears the future—worries about English vocabulary and newly learned Italian phrases, as if learning language might teach us to mourn more easily this difficult present or help us to find, at last, a place we might call home. —Jehanne Dubrow, author of Civilians

Chloe Yelena Miller is a writer and teacher living in Washington, D.C., with her partner and child. She’s the author of Perforated (2026) and Viable (2021), both published by Lily Poetry Review Books, and also the poetry chapbook Unrest (Finishing Line Press, 2013). She co-founded and co-directs Brown Bag Lit, an online writing community. Miller teaches writing and literature through University of Maryland’s Global Campus, Politics and Prose bookstore and New Directions in Writing. Miller has a BA in Italian language and literature from Smith College (1998) and an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College (2003).

Amy Shearn is the award-winning author of five critically acclaimed novels. Her most recent book, Animal Instinct, was one of LGBTQ Reads' most anticipated books of the year, and was called one of the best books of the spring by Oprah Daily, "a sexy novel" by Marie Claire, and a "great new divorce novel" by Vulture. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Modern Love column, Slate, Real Simple, and many other publications. Amy lives in Brooklyn, where she teaches writing, works individually with writers, and runs writing retreats.

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