UA Press releases new poetry book

September 23, 2019

Book cover for Armor and Ornament. Most of the design is black and white. One figure is dressed in blue and has yellow hair. He stands on a fantastical contraption that looks like a complicated chariot. Attendants ride with or walk alongside.

The University of Alaska Press has released a new Alaska Literary Series title, "Armor & Ornament," by Christopher Lee Miles.

In his first collection, Christopher Lee Miles traces the contours of his faith, or lack of it, trying to find his way by the light of images that often lead him astray. In a strange and at times undevotional landscape of lyrics that are always trying and always failing to embrace a paradox they cannot define, these poems explore the loss and gain of sacred desire. Scrawled against a background of militaristic and agricultural violence, "Armor & Ornament" is the record of the hearings of a nearly-deaf ear listening for a God whose first language, Thomas Keating writes, is silence.

Christopher Lee Miles was raised on a farm in southeastern Minnesota. He served four years in the U.S. Navy and was deployed, onboard the USS Arleigh Burke (DDG-51), to Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. His poems have appeared in the Cincinnati Review; Salamander; Sugarhouse Review; War, Literature, and the Arts; and West Branch. He currently works with rural Alaska and Alaska Native students at the Interior Alaska Campus.

For more information about this title and many more please visit www.uapress.alaska.edu or call 800-621-2736.