Who Is Trixie the Trasher? and Other Questions

Miller (Thunderbird) wrestles—at times brawls—with the question of whether a writer, in rendering another person, even a fictional one, wrenches power from her subject. The title poem offers shifting characterizations of the enigmatic “Trixie,” beginning with an overtly sexual possibility: “Is she a faceless woman using a bidet and chamber pot/ bending her backside to you”? New details arrive in quick succession, highlighting the dance among writer, subject, and reader involved in bringing a character to life. Miller’s poems suggest that the necessary counterpart to the politics of description are those of imagination. She deploys a range of moves to push readers to attend to their own active role in filling in what or whom descriptive language evokes. One sly example appears amid a string of couplets in which each line is a portrait with one detail changed: “Woman with her hair held in a rough knot by a red twist, mopping, age 29/ Woman with her hair held in a rough knot by a red twist, mopping, age 56.” Issues surrounding aging, particularly the visibility of older female bodies in social space, run through the collection. Miller’s writing is brassy but earnest, and she suffuses her approach to fraught social politics with humor and exuberant interest in people. (Sept.)