Garden Variety, by Pat Miller

Poetry, chapbook, 24 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Pat Miller’s Garden Variety is a quietly visceral meditation on selfhood, dislocation, and the effort of surviving mundanely yet meaningfully. The poems are stitched together with intimacy in different forms – each piece full of fragmented thoughts, drifting observations, and half-formed realizations that move like weather through Miller’s mind. They are often rooted in physicality – the cold, the wind, the rain – and through this grounding, the reader is pulled into Miller’s efforts to understand time’s strange presence, the erosion of identity, and the elusive clarity of memory.

Despite their domesticity – shaving outside, watching gutters fill with rain – these poems harbor a haunted, elegiac energy. Places like Arkansas and Louisiana occur both as real geographies and as internal territories, spaces where Miller can question his permanence.

Ultimately, Garden Variety is a document of emotional entropy – a portrait of a person feeling himself go soft and brittle in tandem. The poems don’t proclaim revelation so much as stumble across it, then double back uncertainly. Through a variety of observations, Miller wrestles with loss, the slow decay of youth and connection, and whether meaningful attention is enough to stitch anything back together.

Pat Miller is a writer and former line cook currently bouncing around several locations in the American South. His work has previously appeared in several literary journals around the country, such as The Dilettante of New Orleans, and his poetry frequently takes the form of self-produced zines. His interests and writing dwell on disillusionment, shared experiences, and connections between people, the world, and poetry.