- Authors
Tyler Mills
Tyler Mills’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New Republic, The Believer, and Poetry, and her essays in AGNI, Brevity, Copper Nickel, River Teeth, and The Rumpus.
Her forthcoming memoir, The Bomb Cloud, will be published by Unbound Edition Press in 2024. The title is Mills’s fifth book and her first work of nonfiction.
Mills teaches for Sarah Lawrence College’s Writing Institute and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She lives in Brooklyn.
Praise for The Bomb Cloud
“Building out—as if in staggered waves—from a ‘classified’ photo in a family album, The Bomb Cloud grapples with the vexing indeterminacy that afflicts events that become history. What was her grandfather’s role at White Sands, at Hiroshima? What took place in the realm of the unsaid? Doggedly forensic, self-scouring, Tyler Mills works the evidence and asks the hardest questions. There is a palpable tremor at the heart of her account.”
Sven Birkerts, author of Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age
“Tyler Mills is a gorgeous, deft writer, and to read The Bomb Cloud is to be seduced by a beauty which belies its content, like the children who played in the snow-like fallout of an atomic bomb test in 1940s New Mexico. Mills is also tenacious and truth-seeking, and The Bomb Cloud is an unflinching look at the horrors of atomic warfare on people, the environment, a nation’s sense of self, and the repercussions, big and small, of faulty collective and personal memory, and of living inside a white supremacist patriarchy. ‘I had stepped into the murky stillness of the system that had put men in charge,’ Mills writes, ‘and I mucked up the dirt.’ Reading The Bomb Cloud will leave you feeling grateful for the muck.
Lynn Melnick, author of I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: On Truma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton
“Mills writes that ‘the beauty of New Mexico is one of high contrast,’ and I feel that in this work as she tries to uncover unsettling truths with the lush language of a dexterous poet. In this powerful memoir that ‘brings disparate materials together [to]…invite readers to look more deeply at them,’ she has ‘jigsawed the past together’ through ‘study[ing] the shadows.’ A book of history, family, art, and legacy, The Bomb Cloud is as much about destruction and loss as it is about creation. Through lyric prose, photographs, and collage, Mills demonstrates for us the recursive nature of building a narrative map of the unknowable as she strives to reconcile what we know and what we’ve been told with what the records show.”
Chet’la Sebree, author of Field Study and Mistress
“Tyler Mills is a hauntingly powerful writer. Her new book, The Bomb Cloud, has levels of amazement that get richer the deeper you go. It’s gorgeous stuff that you won’t soon forget.”
Luis Urrea, author of The Devil’s Highway
