Poetry is best when it’s a shock of feeling. When I feel jarred awake by art, I know I’ve found something worth a little extra attention.
Groceries by Nora Claire Miller spills into the hybrid terrain to challenge expectations of mixed-genre. It opens a narrative sentence and bulldozes parts of speech to reach its own truest conclusion. It forces its audience to re-learn how to read.
While that may not appeal to everyone, I would love to push this book into everyone’s hands. Like its namesake, Groceries is nourishing, if occasionally also work. Many of the poems teeter closer to sonic poetry than the narrative or expressive poems most of us are used to, and many make conversation with themselves. As a collection, it functions as a dialogue, a criticism and domestic document. It is also an art piece.
I want to give special attention to the ▯s (that’s right, little rectangles; it’s a symbol my word processor does not include under “insert special character”) which create visual poetry, supplement the language, and embody movement on the page. The table of contents contains only seven English words but is a sea of moving s and spaces. These ▯s show movement, rhythm. They say something, sometimes big picture and sometimes zoomed in. In trying to excerpt from Groceries, I find myself unable to provide the necessary space and shapes for some of these pages, but I hope they will be seen and lingered over by many.
I have referred to Miller’s book as a “collection,” and referenced the poems collected therein, but I think it is misleading to expect that there are clear starting and stopping points. There are no titles, no delineation in the table of contents. This book cannot be so easily divided and I found myself drawing Xs in the corners to note what to re-read, what to reference, what to quote. What I noticed in my own bookmarks was variety, more than anything.
The tone is consistent throughout. I think we are led by a single narrator who is observing life on Earth (a refrain) through lists and characters, but without any interest in being linear or transparent. Within these pages are plain experiences, unfiltered, “it’s in the / middle images, ▯ ▯ ▯ pouring forth / from the cracks ▯ ▯ ▯ ▯ ▯ ▯ in the floor. a / pitcher full of oranges. oh teach me to be an oval, to fill in / until the circles return.”
In Groceries, Miller asks us again and again to explain life on Earth. They ask us to take these lists, to inhabit them. “is this a place you can make more places through? life / on earth asked me seriously and with purpose. I nodded / my many earnest heads. night was coming, whistling up / from beneath the sand.”
Upon finishing this book, I began to draw boxes within boxes and writing in the margins between them. Something in this book made me want to explore life on Earth.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s December 2025 issue.
