The Language of a Bomb, by Kelly Miller

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features. In The Language of a Bomb, love and violence share the same vocabulary. These poems begin in girlhood, where harm first takes root in the names that mold us and the myths we inherit, then move through youth marked by reckless desire and impossible promises. What follows is but a continuation: a marriage shaped by the same learned language of longing and damage, where the speaker, still searching for love, remains willing to be burned for it. From smoky dance floors and motel rooms to quiet anniversaries and ancient ruins, the collection traces the slow construction of an emotional detonation, one engineered from childhood wounds and relationships that rupture long after the fuse is lit. Kelly Miller is a poet, romance author, and mother who graduated with her BA in Creative Writing. Her poetry chapbook, A Woman in Four Parts, was published by Bottlecap Press in 2024. She is also the founder of Poets in the Pines, an emerging poetry collective and independent press, where she works as the Creative Director and curator of their anthologies, most recently Made from Midnight: a requiem and its forthcoming sequel, Made from Midnight: delirium. Her work has been published in numerous anthologies, magazines, and journals, including The Magic of Us (2023) and The Heart of Us (2025), and she was a semifinalist for Tulip Tree Publishing’s “Wild Women Contest” (2024). Kelly lives in upstate New York with her fiancé and four children, but she still longs for the Texas dirt roads that raised her.