Butcher

ButcherNatasha T. Miller, 2021 Butcher is a book about love & loss about being unapologetic and transparent in grief. Natasha finds an unexpected solace in the kitchen after losing her best friend and brother, Marcus. Here, using the cuts of the cow as a metaphor Miller, explores addiction, family & tragedy. Butcher takes the body of a cow and cleaves it into 5 parts: envisioning the cuts as relationship with family members and social forces. Her Mother the

Natasha T. Miller, 2021

Butcher is a book about love & loss -- about being unapologetic and transparent in grief. Natasha finds an unexpected solace in the kitchen after losing her best friend and brother, Marcus. Here, using the cuts of the cow as a metaphor Miller, explores addiction, family & tragedy.

Butcher takes the body of a cow and cleaves it into 5 parts: envisioning the cuts as relationship with family members and social forces. Her Mother the rib, her Brother the brisket, her queerness as the tongue and cheek. Butcher is raw and tender. It’s a book that tells the story of a woman who redefined success after losing the most valuable thing to her.

Praise for Butcher

Natasha Miller’s Butcher is a book about silence: all the ways it can calm us and lead us back to the center of ourselves (“You are no less powerful/in all your stillness,”) and all the ways it can harm us and leave us incapable of love. But this is also a book of humor, of how comedy helps us survive, “On this episode of Chopped/all my people make it to the dessert round.//The mandatory mystery ingredients is shit we cooked with before.” There is a lot of “we” in these heartfelt lyrics. No matter the dangers reserved for Miller’s “we,” she refuses to imagine a world without us.

– Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition

In Butcher, Natasha Miller captures the gut of grief; the capacious yearning that loss yields, with no end in sight. She reminds us that the process of mourning is like chasing an insatiability; it consumes in all time and all space. In this suite of poetry, divvied up and served as severed pieces from an anatomy, Natasha Miller makes physical the trajectory of this particular agony, and yet orients us toward, what I feel is often the impulse of Black women, a will to persevere in spite, or rather, in the wake of agonizing loss.

– Taylor Renee Aldridge, co-founding editor of ARTS.BLACK Journal.