Review of Thief
by Jennifer Stewart Miller

Reviewed by Ann Hart

Using lyrical language, clear-eyed honesty, and deeply personal experience, Jennifer Stewart Miller’s collection Thief grapples with the chaos that mental and physical illness can rack on a family, while at the same time celebrating the love and resilience that can survive amidst the havoc. The through line is introduced in the first poem, “My Dead,” when she asks, “Have you ever tried lifting / a dead person off the floor?” The dead person is a metaphor for the many people who are relying on Stewart Miller to carry them when they “aren’t good on their feet,” when they “slip from ladders, tumble down stairs” and are undone by simple things such as “An untied lace. A protruding / thought on a stairs tread.” The poem sets up a somber yet mildly comic tone that carries us, her readers, through the heaviness of a mentally ill sister, dying father, young niece, and other burdens that “won’t even admit / how heavy they are.”

The book is broken into four numbered, untitled sections, but it becomes clear that each section has rhythm and structure that add to the whole of the story Stewart Miller is telling. The first section, with poems written in free verse and with mostly short lines and small stanzas, move us quickly though what feels like the background, the context of the family story. Stewart Miller introduces a sister, known only as J, and the present but absent mother and father. In the poem “Admission,” we learn about J’s first hospitalization when she is described as sinking “into her tar-pit— / words and limbs thick / and slurred.” The poem’s title refers to the process of J being checked in through the E.R., while at the same time accenting the dual realizations of how ill J actually is, and that the parents are unable to manage her care: “Don’t parents know / who to ask, what / to do? No.”. The responsibly for J’s care is shifted to the narrator when the admitting process asks, “do you love / your sister?”.

As the book progresses, Stewart Miller writes about the slow death of a father and the constant challenges of loving and caring for the sister, which we learn includes taking custody of J’s young daughter, as well as the narrator’s journey into her own adult life. In the poem “Arrival” Stewart Miller asks, “Am I / only clay in consequences’ hands / or am I the potter?” “e.e. cumming’s desk,” a tonally dark yet beautifully rendered poem, answers the question with her realization that, while the narrator loves her sister, her father, her niece, and the rest of the people who rely on her, she must take care of herself if she wants to emotionally survive.

Her personal growth is wonderfully illustrated in the poem “How to Fletch Your Own Arrow.” Fletching an arrow is the act of adding feathers to the shaft to improve flight and accuracy. In the poem Stewart Miller advises to begin with beauty, “Steal the sunbird’s plumage … Appropriate / iridescence and gleam” and add support for strength, “wrap them fast with / a bit of sinew.” Following this process, she promises, will lighten the burdens, “Your appendages? These / are not arms, but wings.” Of course, growth doesn’t remove the burdens, as she reminds us in the titular poem, “Thief,” but it does help us to occasionally tell them “fuck you anyway” and “raise a glass to what moon there is.”

Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 24, Issue 1.

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