We the Jury
Wayne Miller
Reviewed by Ali Hintz
Wayne Miller seamlessly blends the domestic and the political in his poetry collection We the Jury. The first poem stakes out the territory of the book: “What are Death’s most notable exports? / Incompletion, oil, / and the arts.” Death pervades this collection in myriad forms including the process of aging, brain tumors, dog graves, and executions. Injustice confounds and confronts. Miller writes about the last man in the U.S. to be publicly executed by the government: “Why won’t they rush forward / to save him? Impossible / this doesn’t happen.”
Miller deftly balances the universality of death with the ways class, race, and circumstance impact it. In “Song from the Back of the House,” he ties the invisibility as well as the individual deaths of the working class to the enjoyment of the rich: “Soon we’ll scatter / like leaves across the lawns / of the powerful—lawns we’ll make / pristine by disappearing.” He investigates the complexity of his family’s close relationship with George Trabing, a murderous “racist travesty of justice” who taught young Miller how to sail.
That poem, “On History,” leads right into the titular poem which casts White people as both the defendant and the jury in the trial of racial injustice past and present. Even after “having come to comprehend the wrongs of which we stand accused / … / we know we will determine the facts / and those facts will become the surface / upon which the world rests… / … / not one of us / will truly understand what we have done.” When the defendants are the jury for their own trial, what justice can be served? Miller acknowledges that acknowledgement can only do so much. He doesn’t offer answers so much as indictment and conviction. In We the Jury, Miller grapples with his role in a world that is filled with death and injustice and yet still, somehow, tempered by love.