This extraordinary collection of deeply personal poetry contains poems of childhood, youth, and adulthood, set mostly in the southern United States. It is a book about reckoning with grief, about the beauty and brutality of life in America, about living in exile in one’s own land.

“There is a sinister beauty in the poems that Claire Millikin weaves in her elegant and haunting collection Elegiaca Americana. These poems create a cartography of loss and redemption, inhabiting the American South’s liminal, abandoned spaces…where human meets animal, woods meet town, road meets fence line, and where roles inhabited—Mother, Father, Daughter, Sister, Wife—become merged and upended.” 

–Meghan Sterling, author of These Few Seeds

“Claire Millikin’s Elegiaca Americana draws from the deep well of experience and keen observation of human vulnerability… These fully realized moments from her life are stoked like a train engine driving toward a destination where clarity comes from the mirror we hold up to our own lives. You may see yourself in these pages. I know I did.”

– Mihku Paul is Wolastoqey, the Executive Editor of Dawnland Voices 2.0, and the author of 20^th Century PowWow Playland

Claire Millikin is the author of eleven collections of poetry. She is the co-editor of Enough! Poems of Resistance and Protest, winner of the 2021 Maine Literary Award. A feminist scholar and art historian, she teaches art history at the University of Maine and for the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts.