Impossible Things

Offering an intimate account of intergenerational grief, Miller Oberman’s new collection of poetry, Impossible Things, explores his experiences as both a transgender child and father. Oberman weaves in passages from his own deceased father’s unpublished memoir to engage with the mysterious drowning of his eldest brother, Joshua, at age two, a tragedy that cast a shadow over his childhood. He depicts his own youth and parenthood in the context of his father’s trauma, employing queer and trans theory and experimental poetic forms to challenge and expand discourse around fatherhood and masculinity. Oberman moves beyond an attempt to solve the mystery of Joshua’s death and interrogates how much we can ever know about our forebears or understand their impacts on our lives. Impossible Things offers a necessary intervention into the well-worn terrain of fatherhood/boyhood memoir and functions as a living elegy, communicating with the past, the dead, and the unknowable while speaking to the possibilities for healing intergenerational trauma.

Table of Contents:
Dedications  xii
Prologue: Two Lunches with my Father  xiv
All These Beloved Books  1
Memoir I  2
Joshua Was Gone  3
Memoir II  6
The Wind Is Loud  7
Memoir III  8
Memoir IIIi  9
Memoir IIIii  10
The Pool, 2019  11
Memoir IV  13
Proper Identification  14
Joy  16
“if this was a different kind of story id tell you about the sea”  17
Memoir V  19
Taharah  20
Memoir VI  21
Twenty-three Facts about Joshua’s Death  22
Memoir VII  23
Dear Mr. Pennypacker  24
Commas  25
Joshua’s Birthday  26
Pottstown Mercury, 1972  28
Memoir VIII  30
Memoir  IX  31
Memoir  IXi  32
History of Fingers  33
Odo  36
Theory  38
Phoenixville, 2020  41
The Centaur  43
Giant Bird  44
Memoir X  46
On Similes  47
Comes With  48
Two Photographs  50
Memoir X  51
Memoir XII  52
Memoir XIII  53
The Field  54
Your Are a Field of Little  62
Memoir XIII  63
Memoir XIV  64
This and That at the Frick  65
How to Sleep  66
Memoir XV  67
Memoir XVI  69
Catskills Poem  70
The Camels  71
Memoir XVI  72
Two Shabbats with Paul Celan  73
Memoir XVII  75
Northport  76
Syntax, 2022  78
Joanne Dies, 2017  79
Memoir XVIII  80
Jewish Cento, 1957  81
Epilogue: Mensch  84
Memoir Cento  87
Memoir Cento i  90
Memoir Cento ii  92
The Cake  94
Notes  97
Acknowledgments  101

About the Author :
Miller Oberman is Director of First Year Writing at Eugene Lang College, The New School, and author of The Unstill Ones: Poems.

Review :
“In this compelling extended elegy, Miller Oberman captures both the possible and Impossible Things of a young child’s death and its effect on a family. I’ve been an admirer of Miller’s poetry since I first read ‘Joshua Was Gone,’ a masterly and devastating poem that embodies the heart and craft of this deeply moving book. Honoring both what’s missing and what remains, Impossible Things is a stunning book you will want to read, reread and keep close.” - Ellen Bass, author of (Indigo) "Impossible Things is, at its heart, a book-length elegy-it endeavors to speak with the dead so that the writer might go on living. To do so, Miller Oberman enacts a trans poetics that insists that an adequate description of everyday life requires admitting what is spectral, impossible, and not (yet) properly named. Anyway, I love these poems. They are tender and funny and charmingly neurotic. They are hurt and hurting, but not moralizing. They surface and bear contraction. They make me, somehow, alive." - Cameron Awkward-Rich, author of (The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment) "There is so much to admire in Oberman’s book-the way the father is never demonized, the frankness with which Oberman copes with his own early gender confusion and resulting abuse at the hands of other children, and the tenderness with which he writes about his transition to adulthood and his own children. The book is a breviary of pain and forgiveness." - Lisa Russ Spaar (The Adroit Journal) "In his book-length elegy Impossible Things, trans poet Miller Oberman explores 'intergenerational grief,' from the perspectives of being a trans child and a father, incorporating his late father’s unpublished memoir. The result is a deeply personal examination of the impacts of family and loss." - Gregg Shapiro (OutSFL) "The inability to truly know our parents is a ripe concept in literature, something timeless that most of us can relate to. Through drawing himself closer to his father in Impossible Things, Oberman offers the reader a chance to do the same as they read along, to ask questions there might not have been a time and place for while parents were alive, to tell stories that are not our own but which we are very much a part of, and to find parallels."
  - Alex DiFrancesco (Chicago Review of Books) "While his musings are tentative, careful, Oberman’s images are crisp and vivid. . . . Oberman crafts a shared disconnection, one that reverberates throughout." - Turi Sioson (Only Poems)