[close] Joseph Millar's poems come out of the American landscape like runaway diesel trucks loaded with miners, electricians, waitresses, ditch diggers, mechanics, factory workers, the homeless, the hopeless, and the lost. These are the voices poetry has classically ignored, finally speaking to us through Millar's expertly detailed lines. Here is the poetry of work, its dignity, pain, pathos, and oppression rendered in poems so tight they tick like clocks, or bombs. Joseph Millar grew up in Pennsylvania and received an MA degree from Johns Hopkins University. He spent 25 years in the San Francisco Bay area, working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines and he has won fellowships from Montalvo Center for the Arts and from Oregon Literary Arts. He now teaches at Mount Hood Community College, in Oregon.