originally published 1/2/2002

Poet Wilmer Mills (1969–2011) discusses how his agricultural and cross-cultural childhood in Brazil shaped his imagination and his relationship with modernity. Concerned with the ways in which modernity and mechanized life go against the grain of human nature, Mills’s third-person narrative poems explore alienation, grief and loss, and the experience of time. He argues that the more poetry becomes untethered from agrarian life, the more it becomes self-focused and expresses alienation. Mills is the author of Light for the Orphans (Story Line Press, 2002).

11 minutes

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