Tom Healy, author of What the Right Hand Knows:

What is recorded in the “manual of dangers”? What can be learned from “the book of migration”? In his beautiful, bruised new book, Without Compass, Benjamin Miller presses questions on us about the risks of losing our bearings in the world of feeling. And his poems hurl us into new territory, answers that are somehow both brutal and comforting.

Much like Louise Glück, Miller creates a calculus of ordinary life “riven by static,” absorbed by the “echolalia” of glances, interviews, communion with nature, with presence, with the self. And from this rigorous attention to dailyness, he charts – without compass, without North Star – intensities of surprise, unexpected visits, encounters, attempts at speech. These gorgeous, painful poems map the unpredictable weather of the psyche: torrential, scorching, cold or calm. We would be lost without them.

There’s an ardency and an urgency to these voyages of the human soul as it encounters faith, doubt, joy and longing. The language of these poems fits like a young skin: smooth, playful and resilient. There’s no flab; just lean, muscular lyric poetry that proceeds not through indirection and metaphor but through clear, concise notation of mood unburdened by self-consciousness of craft or subject. […]

Miller has a collector’s eye; he is the sculptor who carves only what he craves; he is also a man of significant engagement with the questions of belief and doubt. “But if illusions offer comfort,” Miller writes, “it is this: I do not need it.” Perfectly at home in the workshop of the mind’s eye, Miller is nonetheless capable of discarding all the tools and making a poetry refreshingly new and exciting in its discoveries. A great book because it has beneath its skin not only a strong heart but a strong, enduring sensibility.

In these imagistic, shimmering, often enigmatic poems, Benjamin Miller meditates on the ways love and mourning both empty and purify us. Here, figures from the Bible express their fears whisperingly into our ears, and images — a folded bit of paper, blinking lights reflected on an airport window — are described with electric clarity. Seen through a car window, a fence becomes a zoetrope “that speed has all but made transparent, the empty space revealed beyond: a flipbook life” and the landscape outside a tent is “the desert, and outside the desert, sand.” Benjamin Miller’s work is nuanced, discomforting, and filled with a fascinating spiritual awe. This is a very fine and thoughtful book.