Joseph Mills

A professor at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Joseph Mills holds an endowed chair, the Susan Burress Wall Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities. He has published seven collections of poetry with Press 53. His book This Miraculous Turning was awarded the 2015 Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry, and his collection Angels, Thieves, and Winemakers was called “a must have for wine lovers” by the Washington Post. His poetry has been featured several times on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac and in former U.S. poet laureate Ted Kooser's nationally syndicated newspaper column “American Life in Poetry.” In addition to his volumes of poetry, he has researched and written two editions of A Guide to North Carolina’s Wineries with his wife, Danielle Tarmey. He also has edited a collection of film criticism, A Century of the Marx Brothers. He has degrees in literature from the University of Chicago, the University of New Mexico, and the University of California, Davis.

Oh my oh my, I am in love with Bodies in Motion. So healing and intimate. So restorative and jubilant. How can Joseph Mills create every book better than the last?

—Bill Griffin, author of Riverstory : Treestory and editor of Griffin~Poetry blog

Bodies in Motion is connected by poems about dance but artfully twirls between characters doing the funky chicken in the kitchen to dancing The Nutcracker on stage to a gym packed with shuffling adolescents. It steps back and forth in time with the movements of black holes in the universe, George Washington, Charles Dickens, wedding receptions, parents and their families, dance classes, Hollywood musicals, and more. Regardless of how many left feet you may have, you’ll enjoy the show.

—Matt Mason, Nebraska State Poet and author of I Have a Poem the Size of the Moon

In Bleachers, Joe Mills pulls back the curtain on an oft-ridiculed segment of society, the “soccer mom” (or dad!) and reveals the deeper recesses of the human psyche. The realization that to have a child is “the death of the self,” that some days the best you can do as a parent is “just be there,” and myriad other epiphanies. From Pre-Game to Post-Game, from “Aging” to “Zidane,” there are life lessons for player and parent.

—Shaindel Beers, author of Secure Your Own Mask, Winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize 

What an inspired collection! The lines between reality and the stage, between life and art, between past and present—they're all blurred into an exciting whirligig of poetry based on Shakespeare's stage directions. You don't have to be a Shakespeare nut to fall in love with this collection, but these poems are sure to cast a spell that won't be easily broken by man or beast . . . a wonderful piece of literature that should be studied along with Shakespeare's plays in English classes around the world.

—Robert Lee Brewer, author Solving the World’s Problems and editor of Poet’s Market

In general, poets are not saints, yet in his quiet but unapologetic intelligence, his passion, humility, and wisdom, and his understanding of good and evil, Joseph Mills gives us poems that could change the world. Deeply affecting, these poems show us how to live with one another. "I'm searching," he says, "for the right forms for these poems, ones as simple and solid as wooden bowls." Everything here is true: measured, faultless. You do not want to miss this book. This Miraculous Turning is a bona fide miracle.

—Kelly Cherry, former Poet Laureate of Virginia and author of The Life and Death of Poetry: Poems

To Joe Mills a glass of wine reveals a little of "the almost infinite risk in being who we are." Angels, Thieves, and Winemakers is, then, a collection of revelations, truths to be found in and about wine. Witty, mordant, melancholy, funny—these bright poems fix and illumine the many moods we may encounter in a bottle of happy red. I shall recommend this volume most heartedly, saying, “Here, I think this / will help make things a little better.”

—Fred Chappell, author of Dance of Shadows, and former Poet Laureate of North Carolina

I have been reading Joseph Mills’ work for years, but this, his fourth collection, is my favorite. Ultimately, his poems do what poetry should do: simplify the complicated and complicate the seemingly simple. You’ll never think of Rapunzel as a victim again.

—Lori Ostlund, author of The Bigness of the World

Joseph Mills is a poet who understands that Love’s great nemesis isn’t Hate but Time. Time and again, the poems in Love and Other Collisions explore the inherent pain created when Love and Time meet. This book stands as a chronicle of the speaker’s growth from a hopeful youth to a father carving out the best life he can for his own children to a man who is a helpless witness to his mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease. In the words of one poem, Mills “show[s] how you [can] make something of your life if only you [can] stand enough punishment over the years.” Love and Other Collisions is at once ambitious, unflinching, and tender—It is definitely a must-read.

—Shaindel Beers, author of A Brief History of Time

Sample Poems

Whiskey Dancing

The bottle was almost gone when Shane agreed
to give us a demonstration of clogging. He said

his father had been a champion and taken him
to competitions for years. He said a platform

would be best, but the farm’s wooden floor
was good. He began stomping and jumping,

then suddenly, wavering, he yelled, “Catch me,
Betsy! Catch me!” His partner reached out,

awkward and too late, and they fell together,
laughing, entangled in a joyous age-old dance.

(from Bodies in Motion, Copyright © 2023 by Joseph Mills)

Introductions Made Easy

If only people wore labels,
their foreheads clearly displaying
their appellation, their varietal,
their alcohol content,
think of the time it would save.
We could cut out the small talk,
the “Where are you from?”
and “What do you do?”
Appropriate pairings
would be more obvious.
We might know if they met
government standards,
and we would have a better idea
who might improve with age
and who we should enjoy
right now.

(from Angels, Thieves, and Winemakers, Copyright © 2008 by Joseph Mills)

Swimming Lessons

My wife and I are swimmers from families
of swimmers, so we expected our daughter
would be a swimmer, and we’re surprised
that she refuses to put her head underwater.
If even a drop touches her face, she cries out
and gropes for a towel. Nothing we try works,
so we sign her up for lessons with Mrs. White,
who soon has her swimming lengths of the pool.
I watch and wonder what I could have learned
from my parents had they not been my parents.
Afterwards, my daughter runs up, laughing,
“Did you see me, Daddy?” and I swing her high,
pat her face dry with my tie as the teacher says,
smiling, “She has a very good black…Her black...

I’m sorry… Her BACKstroke will be good.”
She looks embarrassed, and I understand.
A white parent and a black child can knock
the most well-meaning people off balance.
Since Mrs. White is Black, I want to laugh,
instead I say, “That’s good.” My daughter
senses something has surfaced unexpectedly
then submerged, just as she feels something
is odd when people look past me to locate
her parents or ask, “Is she yours?” Someday
she’ll understand more about the currents
around us and why we insisted she learn
to swim. Someday, she may even realize
how clenched we are each time she goes in.

(from This Miraculous Turning, Copyright © 2014 by Joseph Mills, winner of the Roanoke-Chowan award for Poetry.