Time & the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire
COMING IN FEBRUARY, 2026
What lasts, and what endures? Through more than fifty poems, the first volume of Time and the River takes in war from ancient Nubia to the atomic bomb and Cold War spies, creativity from prehistoric Europe to Emily Dickinson and Albert Einstein, and the sacred from Israelite prophets, the gods and goddesses of old Europe, and Viking-age seers. Painters and writers, ancient Rome and Iron Age burials, Egyptian tombs and high school in America circa 1999 – all find a voice here.
Advance Praise:
“In narratives and persona poems, and in alliterative verse, free verse, and rhyme, in a range from deep prehistory to the almost-yesterday of Columbine, Miller has the chutzpah to explore the full humanity of humans ancient and modern, famous and infamous, legendary and daily-bread real. It takes both empathy and daring to attempt to enter so many minds, but Miller has both.” – Maryann Corbett
“In a world that forgets or else distorts its own history, we must rely on our poets to probe the sweeping historical currents and deep swells. Tim Miller is a poet unafraid of the task. In Time & the River: Poems from History, his poetry collection takes us from “Dylan Klebold’s Crush,” in 1999, to the discovery of fire, about 1.8 million years ago. In ‘Merlin, ‘ the wizard tells us: ‘The essence of magic is wandering, /not altering history or circumstance/but sliding to the other side of both.’ This is what Miller does so well here, telling stories not to alter history or circumstance, but to deepen into the experience of human history and its effects on us.” – John Bradley, author of As Blood Is the Fruit of the Heart: A Book of Spells
“Tim Miller’s book of historical poems takes us back in time – beginning with the gunfire of near-contemporary America, and walking us backward to the invention of fire itself. Along the way, he finds ‘a face and a mask for every encounter, ‘ inhabiting figures from far-flung times and places, a mystical empathy and resonance with the dead. In many ways, this is poetry as ancestor-worship, ‘surrounded by the drugs of deep history.’ The poet’s filial piety embraces all the peoples of the past, creating a book that both preserves and transfigures the past through language – ‘none of it new but all of it remade.’” – Amit Majmudar, author of Three Metamorphoses
