Miller Oberman’s poetry collection Impossible Things is a mesmerizing elegy for a young child and thoughtful examination of the author’s own childhood.
The Chicago Review of Books wrote of the book:
“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”
In his own words, here is Miller Oberman’s Book Notes music playlist for his poetry collection Impossible Things:
My new book of poems, Impossible Things, released by Duke UP, began as my attempt as a new parent to deal with the realization that parts of my experience were shaped by the fact that I’d been parented by a father who lost a child. My father’s first son, Joshua, was born in 1970 and died in what seems to have been a (never adequately explained) drowning accident in 1972. While I knew this had happened, I was deeply unprepared for how it would affect me as a new father myself, and since I couldn’t talk to my father about this (he had died 10 years previous), I began writing poems that dealt with my brother’s death and my new parental anxiety, as well as my own conceptions of masculinity within a new gendered experience of parenthood. Though my father was no longer around, he’d written an unfinished and unpublished memoir about his son’s death, so I began there.
My first idea was to investigate Joshua’s death, since it remains quite mysterious to this day, but I ran into nothing but dead ends—everyone who had been part of the initial investigation was either unreachable or had died themselves, and so I switched gears, writing poems that engaged with my own experiences of masculinity as a trans masculine child, what it felt like to now be a parent, and attempting to communicate with my father on the page. I knew early on that I wanted to find a way to incorporate his memoir, and wound up taking some of what I felt were the best bits of his writing and crafting them into erasure poems.
I’m a poet and not a musician, but my family is full of them. My father was a fine guitarist and singer, and (see below) briefly in a somewhat well-known prog-rock band called Woody’s Truck Stop. My partner Louisa Solomon and my brother Elijah Oberman were founding members of the rock band The Shondes. What I listened to while working on this project was a product of all of this—AND also of living with first one, then two small children, who have their own ideas about music. I can’t speak for all toddlers, but I found mine to be profoundly resistant to most of the extremely moody music that had previously been a staple for me. (Elliott Smith is absolutely unacceptable to them, etc.) As a poet, I now see this acted as a kind of formal constraint for me, but also my book, which is (moments of humor notwithstanding) often very sad. A lot of the book was written while my firstborn, Rosie, was first discovering their love of music, and it was so lovely to be brought along for that ride. Delving into the deaths of my father and brother, considering how my own gender was shaped/misshaped by incidents of childhood bullying, it’s probably a good thing that I was almost disallowed from non-upbeat music during this time. The playlist that follows is really, at least 80%, Rosie’s playlist.
Songs
“People Been Talkin’” by Woody’s Truck Stop: I often listened to the single album Woody’s Truck Stop made while I worked on these poems, more than anything just to hear the sound of my father’s voice. He joined the band in 1967 as Todd Rundgren’s replacement, (he was the lead singer and played acoustic guitar) and was fired about a year later after they finished making their album. They were considered the best local band in Philadelphia during these years, and opened for the likes of Jimmy Hendrix, Cream, and Joni Mitchell, and this song was the closest thing they had to a hit. In some of the songs on their album my father’s voice gets lost in creative noise, but it comes through with clarity and sweetness in this song. “People been talkin’… tellin’ a story” the song begins, which allowed me to start talking and telling one of my own. I find it deeply strange to look at photos and listen to my father’s voice from these years when he was still a young person who hadn’t yet had a child, let alone lost one. This was someone I never knew—the photos of him remind me more of my own students, college undergraduates, than of the man who was my father.
“Special” by Lizzo (featuring SZA): My kids are obsessed with Lizzo, and this song was particularly moving to me when it came out. While Lizzo isn’t speaking specifically to trans experience, with lyrics like “I’m used to feeling alone, so I thought that I’d let you know, in case nobody told you today, you’re special… I’m so glad that you’re still with us” I can’t help thinking what it would have meant to me to hear a song like this as a young, very alone trans kid. Her anthem of self-love is totally aspirational to me (and maybe to her) and I love the way her voice takes off over the steadiness of the beat. “Broken but damn you’re still perfect” is something I needed to hear as both a trans person and a parent realizing I had a lot of baggage to unpack.
“Everything Good” by The Shondes: I hope I can be forgiven for not having a favorite Shondes song, given my connections to this amazing band. So, this is not my favorite Shondes song, but it’s one I listened to a lot while working on this project. While I’m not big on universals, I think most people who were gender non-conforming as children received messages that they were not anything good, let alone EVERYTHING good. I struggle with self-hatred as much as the next trans guy/person, and this song is just an absolute balm. Louisa’s voice goes back and forth between so much power and tenderness as the song winds through this lovely journey of exploration, as the “you” is invited into a healing journey to investigate lots and lots of flowers. Eli’s violin rises triumphantly, and while I’m listening to this song, I feel a kind of arcing flight, offering a way of witnessing past suffering from a place of love. At the risk of alienating everyone else who feels this song as deeply as I do (you are all everything good, I swear) it’s incredibly moving to listen to this song knowing that it’s a love song written for me.
“True Colors” by Cyndi Lauper: I’ve loved Cyndi Lauper as long as I can remember, and thank g-d Rosie also loves her. “True Colors” in particular drew Rosie in, reminding me of my own childhood experience of Cyndi’s sincerity. I love the slow build of this song, the syncopation, how alternately quiet and raspy her voice is. I grew up mainly without tv though, so it was pretty revelatory to watch the music video for this song. Cyndi’s hair! The unbelievably dramatic slow drumming! But I didn’t expect how literally the video took the song to the place where I was already hearing it—on that lunar looking beach, where sand can become water if you put your hands down and row. The video is sheer perfection, IMO—the way it pairs extreme levels of performativity with the absolute earnestness of the sentiment. It’s so pure in all the best ways.
“Dance Apocalyptic” by Janelle Monae: A lot of this book was written during the lockdown part of Covid, and this song really helped me blow off steam. I don’t think there was something more danced-to in our home than this song, which breaks in as a news report and turns an apocalypse into a party, however briefly. “Smash, smash, bang, bang, don’t stop, shalangalangalang!” This song in our house was basically a magic trick—by turning it on we could turn any apocalyptic toddler meltdown into a dance party. This was on Rosie’s 3 year old playlist of songs they called “jump music,” consisting of songs that make you have to jump around.
“For My Lover” by Tracy Chapman: One thing that happened while I was working on Impossible Things is that I found I had to at least attempt to find some fondness for my younger self, and so I embarked on a project of listening to music I listened to in middle school and high school, which often felt sort of embarrassing, unsurprisingly. I will never be ashamed, though, of how great I think Tracy Chapman’s music is, and this song is one that still really hits home. I went to high school in Virginia in the ‘90’s, and as a queer and trans kid (though lacking those words) hearing Chapman sing lines like “two weeks in a Virginia jail, for my lover” and “every day I’m psychoanalyzed for my lover” evoked in me a deeply recognizable terror connected to love and identity that as far as I knew, had never been put into words before. Her voice is so steadfast, and its velvety smoothness creates, in me, an enormous and deeply felt tension created by the strength of queer resolve and the likelihood of impending danger.
“Stand” by R.E.M.: Anyone who knows me from high school would think I’d been body swapped if I didn’t include an R.E.M. song here—they have long been one of my favorite bands. I started writing poetry around the time Monster came out, and I laughed years later when I realized many of my first poems were essentially written to the rhythm of songs from that record, and could literally be sung along with. I can’t believe I’m admitting this, it’s so embarrassing! “Stand” (from their wonderful album, Green) is one of their absolute fluffiest and poppiest songs, and I find it straddles this strange line between saying almost nothing and being utterly profound. There’s a poem in my book that was originally called “The Map” and which is now called “Phoenixville” about trying to find my father’s old house, the one he’d lived in with his first wife when their son died. But this was during the Covid lockdown days, so I was limited to writing a poem about trying to find this place using maps online, and it being impossible to do so—I kept running into pixelated bushes, gated off roads. I remember a day working on this poem in my garage in Queens, and being so deeply frustrated, when this song came into my head. I immediately played it, and it so suited this poem and feeling I was having. For me, this will always be the soundtrack to that poem. “Your head is there to move you around” really is a great description of what I was doing. Additionally, (so far) this is the only R.E.M. song I’ve discovered that my kids will tolerate.
“Dayenu” by anonymous: This severely upbeat song, commonly sung during the Passover seder, is more than one thousand years old, and Rosie, my oldest, encouraged us to sing this song to them about a thousand times (low estimate?) between 2020-2021. The song, which has many verses, suggests that “it would have been enough,” meaning that the Jewish people are grateful for the gifts bestowed upon us by g-d, like having been given the sabbath, being delivered from slavery, and so on. Even one of these gifts “would have been enough,” but there were so many more! I’ll refrain from analysis of the song and I’ve just deleted too many sentences about ritually spilling out drops of wine during a seder, because what’s important here is that Rosie was OBSESSED with this song. For more than a year. They wanted it as a lullaby. Every night. One poem in my book deals with a traumatic injury Rosie suffered when they were 3, when their hand was seriously injured, and which I was also present for. But what the poem doesn’t tell you is that when your toddler goes into surgery they let a parent come in, and Louisa went in with Rosie. As they were about to start anesthesia, they told Louisa she could sing a song if Rosie wanted, and, of course, Rosie demanded “Dayenu.” Might this mark the only time a singer in a rock band sung this song in an operating room?
“Long Live Palestine” by Low Key: As I wrote in the introduction to my book, I turned Impossible Things in to my editor on October 1, 2023, a week before the start of the devastating genocide we’ve all spent the last year plus watching unfold in Gaza. As I worked with my editors, I found the landscape I saw the book in utterly changed. I’d spent years writing about the generational trauma caused in one family by the death of one child, and now we are confronted by tens of thousands of murdered children and parents. Suddenly, a project I’d thought of as about grief turned into one of privilege, as I considered the safety I’d had, for years, to consider my loss and my father’s loss without bombs falling outside. All my dead had been respectfully buried, while others are lost under rubble. The lyrics of this song (written in 2009, long before the current genocide) are so brilliantly smart, as he reminds us where the money we spend on products really goes. His rhymes are cutting and rageful and inventive, and I don’t know who’s singing the hook, but it’s a lovely contrast– the beautiful high soaring voice behind the driving beat and Low Key’s unflagging anger when he spits truths like “nothing is more antisemitic than Zionism.”
Miller Oberman is Director of First Year Writing at Eugene Lang College, The New School, and author of The Unstill Ones: Poems.