Disharmonies
Poetry collaboration between Geordie Miller and Marilyn Lerch.
Printed digitally in 3 colours throughout, letterpress-printed cover.
Japanese stab-stitch binding, 46pp
Marilyn Lerch and Geordie Miller's Disharmonies is a poetic conversation between two poets/against capitalism. Angry, honest, comradely, despairing – their lines both belong to and look beyond a world organized to generate profit rather than satisfy human needs. Written in the throes of the pandemic, the sequence ultimately expresses their shared hope that "the very simplest words / Must be enough. When we say what things are like / Everyone’s heart must be torn to shreds. / That you’ll go down if you don’t stand up for yourself / Surely you see that." This book speaks from the conviction that if poetry could save the world, we'd be a lot closer to where we need to be.
Geordie Miller is a poet and teacher who believes that another, better world is possible. His poems commune with revolutionaries like Bertolt Brecht, Langston Hughes, Marilyn Lerch, Wendy Trevino, and many additional comrades. He published a poetry collection called Re:union (with Invisible, 2014) and made an EP called Tire Fire (with his band, flour). The next poetic collaboration, with Kate Miller, is a Toronto Arts Council-funded collection on maternal family history and disability communities. He is Vice President of his faculty union, chair of the MLA’s Radical Caucus, and a #1 cat dad to Herman, Jeff, and Claudia.
Maybe it was something in the Maritime water, certainly it was love, that allowed my poet self to emerge. Twenty-six years in Canada has brought forth “Lambs & Llamas, Ewes & Me”, “Moon Loves Its Light”. “Witness and Resist”, “The Physics of Allowable Sway” and “That We Have Lived at All”. Other chances to give back to the community I love came as president of the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick and as Sackville’s Poet Laureate. The sixth collection is moving slowly through earth heating, pandemic, war, and global capitalism’s incessant drum beat. But look at those who are organizing Amazon and Starbucks!