Claire Millikin is a poet, professor and scholar. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines, and she has published the chapbook The Gleaners (Tiger's Eye Press, 2013), her first poetry collection, Museum of Snow (Grayson Books, 2013). Millikin's book, Witnessing Sadism in Texts of the American South, on photographer Carrie Mae Weems, authors Toni Morrison, Dorothy Allison and Flannery O'Connor, is forthcoming. She currently teaches Art History and Sociology as a Lecturer at University of Virginia.

Other poems by Claire Millikin in Verse Daily:
February 4, 2014:   "The Foxes" "Step by step, door by door, she opened the house..."

Books by Claire Millikin:

Other poems on the web by Claire Millikin:
"Materiality in Poetry"

About After Houses:

"Claire Millikin writes with deep feeling, craft, and delicacy about trauma; she makes obsessive, careful music—in the manner of Joseph Cornell's sublime work—from her repeated divinations of foreclosed and melancholy vistas. An astute critic as well as a scrupulous and admirably driven poet, she combines formal élan and emotional intensity. I think of her poems as following in the noble, painful tradition of Maurice Blanchot—language reaching toward silence."
—Wayne Koestenbaum

"As Claire Millikin puts it in the final poem of her After Houses, Poetry for the Homeless, 'This is a book of escape & survival.' Memory here does more than talk, it sings through eloquently detailed poems about exile from a beloved house, about 'crossing thresholds' in cars with a baby, about growing older. Although all of us readers' lives differ, this book can also be shared as 'our history. Don't turn away.'"
—Henry Braun

"Claire Millikin's deeply perceptive and elegiac poems remind us that the words we use to define the world are the same words that define our losses. Acknowledging the perilous journey of human survival, these poems teach us that 'the four walls of/ a house may vanish if/ we do not define it.' Both lush with language and haunting, After Houses is a work of uncanny beauty."
—Kathleen Ellis