Let me tell you about the settings of Miriam Kramer’s poems: Gas station bathrooms, urgent cares, police stations, and court rooms. Imagined funerals and Google searches for assisted suicides. It sounds like a bleak geography, and yet––within the emotional desert of some downtrodden landscapes, Kramer’s poetry feels like an oasis. Never did I expect to be so quenched by a book. Yes, these poems tackle mental illness, drug addiction, and violence. But if you worry this is a ‘dark’ book –– I guarantee you haven’t read it. Between these pages, you will find an explosion of light.
~Megan Falley, author of Drive Here and Devastate Me
Built By Storms is a familiar scream, a compass for the broken-hearted, a map written with whatever you got left. Miriam Kramer leads the reader down a dark path of personal history with roads that trail into addiction, violence and mental health, lit by a poetic voice bright with rage and love . This collection explores the shadows humanity creates both in life and death, questions “loss” vs “taken” and offers you a world where questions are as good as answers. This book is an uncomfortable conversation and the relief after. Kramer remembers it all and will not let you forget.
~Siaara Freeman, author of Urbanshee
Raw, lyrical, searing, reassuring, and beautifully uncomfortable. These are hard-earned scars. Even after I put the book down, Miriam’s poems were not done with me.
~Buddy Wakefield, author of A Choir of Honest Killers
