Millie Tullis

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Advanced Praise:

“These Saints are Stones proposes, in its very title, to consider the markers and monuments of the Mormon past—cemeteries, headstones, whatever remains to name and commemorate ancestors. These poems are one kind of deep mapping, a way of getting at some of the truth, with their sinuous, chimeric forms, their calm, considering voice, even when, as the speaker of ‘Pinto Cemetery’ notes, ‘I do not know / which graves / are graves.’”
—Lisa Bickmore, Utah Poet Laureate and author of Haste, Ephemerist, and flicker

“Ghost-woven. Hunger-haunted. Tullis’s debut collection labors to unerase the past. She imagines into the gaps and silences of her pioneer ancestors, attempting to reckon family stories that refuse to square. In spare, musical lines, Tullis is unflinching in sifting together historical scraps, letters, grave markers, interviews, artifacts, and her own reimaginings. She captures grief, loneliness, and mystery, while stitch-ripping at the thread of violence against women. If attention is prayer, this collection is a prayerbook, a quilted text, a lasting monument to the pioneer women from Tullis’s family tree and, by extension, our own.”
—Dayna Patterson, author of If Mother Braids a Waterfall andO Lady, Speak Again

“A stunning work of history and imagination. From heart-breaking family stories and her inspired readings of recovered letters and documents, Tullis composed lean, spare poems of nervy, tensile strength, poems that live up to the women and Utah landscapes they describe.”
—Jennifer Atkinson, author of The Thinking Eye