A review by foggy_rosamund
Honorifics by Cynthia Miller

4.0

I really enjoyed this expansive, imaginative collection about migration, love, home, and what we learn from water and the ocean. In experimental and sensually-rich poems, Miller explores her Malaysian heritage, her family history, and moving between multiple cultures. She's also very interested in water -- one of my favourite pieces in this book is a sequence, Bloom, about jellyfish, which captures oceans full of jellyfish, jellyfish travelling through space, and jellyfish as a metaphor for the mistreatment of refugees. She also writes about swimming, being under water, and different ways of understanding salt water. Another surprising poem is "Proxima B", which is a long thought experiment, looking at what it would mean to love someone on a different planet, and the ways light travels through space. She's also not afraid to experiment: the poem "Glitch honorifics" flows across the page like a family tree, in a series of boxes, as she looks at untranslatable words. I also really admired her more formal poems: I usually find ghazals disappointing, but Miller's "Moon goddess ghazal" was a real stand-out piece for me, cleverly using a restrictive form to write an expansive poem. Another favourite was "Persimmon abcedarian", which captures the beauty of persimmons, mothers as migrants, and trying to celebrate the Chinese new year in a tiny British flat. Miller's voice is memorable and compelling, and she's definitely a poet to watch.