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.

Lytton Smith, author of While You Were Approaching the Spectacle But Before You Were Transformed by It:

Both as it saunters with the prophet’s stride and traipses with the acolyte’s hurry-up, Ben Miller’s precise debut is a work of forceful imagination and elegant verve – a masterstroke of approach and echolocation. These deft, Escher-like poems appear like magical tricks, yet there’s no gimmick to their studied resonance. As he reveals the significance of transitional spaces — borders, twilight, doubt – Miller shows us how we might think, if not more clearly about our lives, then more fully.

Kevin Prufer, author of In a Beautiful Country:

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.