“‘The essence of the cicada,’ Claire Millikin says, ‘is burial and ascension,’ which is also the essence of this stunning book, Magicicada. Grounded in the experience of a young teen’s solitary confinement (for truancy and silence, her only defense against violation), these poems draw on metaphor, and linguistic fluidity to suggest how the mind encounters and resists its own destruction. Seeing in the cicadas an emblem of confinement and release, Millikin says, ‘You don’t spend 17 years buried without the need to make a song.’ And sing she does—a haunting song that draws on all the resources of language, making a kind of litany against the brutality of isolation. It is a song that can’t be written prettily, the poet says. But it can be written with a light touch, with suppleness and complexity, drawing on layers of experience, and wonder as well, until the writing itself becomes a fierce ascension. These brilliant poems are thrillingly alive with a beauty that goes far beyond pretty, a beauty that can break your heart. That is, break it open.”
—Betsy Sholl, author As If a Song Could Save You
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Independent Press Award
2025 Distinguished Favorite
“Magicicada” blends science and sorrow, weaving a poignant narrative of self-blame and stifled voice into the hopeful emergence of song. While some poems unflinchingly expose the brutal realities of our society, leaving an undeniable impact, the poet’s profound language and evocative imagery ultimately empower us to envision a future of greater compassion and coherence.
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“I try to come back to myself. // Given what I have seen” Millikin writes in “Statuary of Roadside Motels,” one of many rich, haunting poems in
Magicicada that unearth the horrors of Millikin’s and the American past and create a new, nuanced perspective out of that resurrection. What Millikin has seen is horrifying, from sexual abuse to solitary confinement, and her trauma returns periodically, like the life cycle of the magicicada, who live for spans of 13 or 17 years as “burrowing nymphs in the ground” before emerging, en mass, to reproduce for a few weeks before dying. Throughout, she links what she’s seen to the cicadas, finding surprising yet resonant connections: “The electrocardiogram of the cicada is not dissimilar / from the pulse of my father in his eighty-sixth year.”
—Claire Millikin
Millikin structures her collection according to numbered “Brood”s and her overarching narrative with the language of this insect’s essence, especially its cycles of “burial and ascension.” The result explores fraught metamorphoses as Millikin lays bare delusions of safety, justice, family, and the American myth. Neither Millikin nor America at large here experience a linear timeline but rather something more like a wheel, continually turning. “The story is a sting, immortal,” and “ancestors are buried, // which should be an ending but isn’t” because history is a constant process of death and rebirth.
There is no resolution to this process for Millikin, no forgetting or solving the scars of the past; “the magicicada lift // carrying earth’s buried errata, // tearing open a tarnished sky, // where Jefferson’s slaves labored.” However, through this powerful reckoning with America’s collective identity, rooted in both ingenuity and unfathomable violence, Millikin’s poetry suggests that we attain something akin to the angelic nobility of the cicada, making music that echoes “the sound of stars,” and carrying in congregation the paradox of progress and renewal. It is no coincidence Millikin this publication year: “2024, they say, will be a magical year for cicada broods.”
Takeaway: Brooding, revelatory poems that meditate on cicadas and cycles.
Comparable Titles: Rickey Laurentiis’s “Southern Gothic,” Lucille Clifton’s “Sorrows”
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Cover: A
Design and typography: A
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Editing: A
Marketing copy: A
Review by Judy Kaber
By Mom Egg Review
A scholar and a prolific writer, Claire Millikin’s ninth book of poetry, Magicicada (Unicorn Press, 2024), reflects her continuing feminist stance. In it she examines the fate of girls and young women who grow up voiceless and abused in a patriarchal society. Having been raised in the deep south, the song of periodical cicadas wove itself into Millikin’s consciousness and in this book of poems she uses the life cycle and the song of those cicadas as a vehicle to express the brutality of a young teen placed in isolation and her ultimate release.
The poetic forms in the book are primarily free verse, but the persona of the girl in solitary confinement is introduced in a villanelle which ends:
Solitary confinement for the fourteen-year-old truant
who waits it out, eating just enough to stay alive,
waiting for someone to half believe, to take her side.
They will teach her what should never be taught,
solitary confinement where the child memorizes silence.
The repetitive form of the villanelle brings home the despair of the child, the depth of the abandonment and abuse. Too many women will be able to relate to this, however, the poems move forward carrying the reader to healing and even the possibility of forgiveness.
It’s evident that care was taken in the arrangement of the poems in this book with clear connections between poems, one poem expanding into the next. The poem, “Red Dog,” continues the braid of girl and insect and the cry for/of release:
Buried seventeen years,
at last the cicadas’
risen cries become harmonium, one note biding the next,
audible distance
…
They placed me in solitary
because they considered me imperious. Imperious.
I was fourteen years old, starving,
and too scared to talk.
Cicadas’ music is almost violence,
almost an endless
series of buckling ribs. No one
spoke to me or listened in those solitary days.
The beauty and urgency of these poems is heartbreaking. The reader is pulled along looking for the release that is promised in the metaphor of the cicadas, that after being a “burrowing nymph” in the ground, the child, like the insect, will rise and sing.
Millikin’s description of the Magicicada’s ascendance in the poem, “Succor,” uses technical details, linguistic fluidity, and a rising tone to continue to lead the readers toward the possibility of salvation, even in light of institutional maltreatment.
Then their voices strum the acres—
syncopating tymbal by tymbal,
a chorus deeper
than crickets, locusts, katydids,
cicada wings fan hollow ribs,
like wires plucked a thousand, thousand times.
In the same poem, we see how the speaker’s incarceration leads to an inner strengthening, the shaping of a voice, if as yet only an interior one.
You don’t spend seventy-seven days
in solitary confinement at age fourteen
without the need to say this
is what it was, your fifteenth birthday
in solitary’s
hard human sky.
Where you learned to sing
without a congregation.
Described as savage—“The essence of my father was violence”—the father becomes vulnerable in the poem, “Cicada Heart.” Here the father’s heart trouble is compared to the cicada heart with seven parts, as if his heart may also be divided into unknowable sections, his own weakness now laid bare:
I hear my father’s voice, west Georgia drawl, agreeing
to submit to anything that might save his life,
and he sounds weak
as if he never used a closed fist.
In the penultimate poem in the book, “Pink Dress Truant,” the speaker, wearing the gift of a pink dress, becomes Jackie Onassis “climbing/ the back of the car like a mystic,/ refusing to wash off the blood,/ hide what they’d done.” Lodged solidly in this poem are the beginnings of healing, the hope for ultimate resolution, even, possibly forgiveness.
I’m begging even now
that some late pink sky might heal us—
put on this dress of a solitary place,
pink of civil sunset
then nautical twilight then all the way
through astronomical dusk, this garment.
Magicicada is a book that skillfully combines science and sorrow, that weaves a story of swallowed self-blame and muffled voice into the possibility of a re-emergence in hope and song. Some of the poems in the book are difficult to read in their brutal exposure of the inhumanity of our society, but ultimately the poet’s rich language and powerful imagery give us permission to envision a more coherent and kinder future.
Magicicada by Claire Millikin
Unicorn Press, 2024 $25
9780877751618
Judy Kaber is the author of three chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Pleiades, Poet Lore, and Prairie Schooner. Her poem, “Sword Swallowing Lessons,” was featured on “The Slowdown.” Judy won the 2021 and 2023 Maine Poetry Contest. A Maine Literary Award winner, her book, Landscape With Rocks, Sky, Nails, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press in 2025. She is a past poet laureate of Belfast, Maine (2021-2023).
In “Magicicada,” A Voice Long Buried Emerges and Sings
The Southern Review of Books
The psychosocial impact of childhood trauma takes years to untangle and recover from. In Magicicada, which is titled after the genus of cicadas, Claire Millikin maps trauma to the cicadas’ cyclical lives of “burial and ascension.” Cicadas spend most of their lives underground, voiceless and in the dark, a fitting metaphor for those who have experienced childhood trauma, and emerge in 13- or 17-year cycles, trilling their sharp, congregational song. This collection offers an intimate series of poems that follows one speaker’s experience as she learns to break free from the code of silence she was coerced into as a child. In the dysfunctional family dynamic of this world, the speaker’s father is abusive while her mother is indifferent, choosing to spare the family reputation rather than protect her daughter. While this is a serious collection, it isn’t somber; there’s hope and strength that arises out of the natural cycle of growing up, taking flight, and finally finding one’s voice.
Set in the contemporary South, Magicicada sometimes references the antebellum period that shaped the culture, as seen in the imagery of declining refinery and social expectation of acquiescence from women. In the poem “Caryatid,” the grandeur of classical Greek architecture survives, but it’s “broken and strong, outlasting / interior rooms, so exposed.” These columns of women hold up the home, even as they face “the rapid stare of the winds, and human misuse.” Caryatids parallel the women in the speaker’s life who endure silently and “never walk away” from a marriage or a home, even as they face battering: “They hold up sky and swelling tidal drives.”
While these poems are personal, they also elevate themselves to a political level. As the poet writes, “Confessional poetry is often a term of belittlement. / Leveraging the grammatical illusion of a self” as a trick. It’s always a pleasant surprise when a poem can exist inside a collection but also speak to the craft of poetry writing itself. In “Confession,” we glimpse a bit of philosophy standing behind the poet, who wears “only language.” This is an important contrast to the clothing referenced throughout the collection such as a “carceral gown” or a “dress paper thin / betting on men seeing her skin.” Language, the very act of speaking truth, is denied this speaker. From the silencing that occurs within the family and the silencing that comes from the state, we witness a fate that many women have faced throughout history as part of a patriarchal system.
In “The Structure of Time in a Burning House,” we watch a metaphorical fire consume the home even as, “the mother keeps saying there’s no danger.” Behind the house “a generations-old oak / shimmers like a candelabrum” and inside, “as the family eats at the oak table, / it’s she alone who sees the fire / and she will never be allowed to speak of it.” Family secrets flicker and burn and yet even as we see the danger approach, dysfunctional family roles are maintained, each contributing to the all-consuming fire.
In the title poem, “Magicicada,” the reader is haunted by the speaker’s plight as she appeals to get herself out of the state asylum. The teenage speaker has spent time in solitary confinement for her socially unacceptable reaction to her father’s inappropriate touching:
Every thirteen years, she returns—
mind, soul, wings
opening, the terrible bruising
where the Charlottesville police have handled her
legs, head, wings
opening, she calls you, entering
the vast circulation of data, Come get me!
Like the cicada that spends most of its life in silence, our speaker is “inaudible for years, then surface[s]… carried on golden wings beyond asylum.” It is a reminder that minors in our society must often rely on the same adults who cause them harm in order to return home.
In “Wedding Garment,” the speaker acknowledges that as girls, “our bodies, when we were young, were given / to those to whom we never said Yes.” This lack of consent and treatment of the speaker and her female kin as objectified women threads throughout the poems in a world that’s about maintaining an outward appearance via “pretty dresses.” “She taught me / to wear pretty dresses like that. / When you feel bad, look good.”
Many of the poems in this collection exist in that liminal state of in-between, the space trauma survivors occupy where “you can’t tell the difference / between sky and ocean. Horizon vanishes / and you’re alone with your memory of it.” The transitional state is the hard part of remembering the truth, acknowledging what happened, and processing it in order to rebuild and heal. Magicicada captures this internal, often elusive process in a vulnerable and sensitive manner that many readers will relate to. Millikin demonstrates a profound respect for trauma and the growth that can take place when a survivor realizes their strength and claims their voice. At one point, the speaker recognizes, “I am a broken thing and dangerous because of it.” In “Nietzsche’s Horse,” the speaker reflects:
Sometimes I turn back, in mind,
to my survival strategy in solitary
of stepping up
and down on the small fixed chair,
up and down, over and over, for hours
until I grew so strong
I became a horse, and have run
long distance ever since I got out.
Even as readers share in witnessing this trauma, we also watch the speaker navigate and grow from it. In a world that is dangerous to female bodies, it may take a woman years to find her voice. The brilliance of Magicicada is that it gives readers permission to use those voices when they do arrive, no matter how long it takes. Millikin reminds us we can rebuild from ruins and learn to cope so we can “sing / without a congregation.”
Unshod Music: A review of Magicicada by Claire Millikin (reviewed by S. Stephanie)
Hole in the Head Review
In the cicada, Millikin has found an apt metaphor for the burrowing and burying, the waiting and the bursting out from protective gestation and hibernation into the song all rape, incest, and abuse survivors must sing before they are allowed to transform. Before they are allowed to even begin healing, begin living. That long and repetitive cycle is mimicked justly in these poems. Millikin’s artful use of “Broods” to separate and gather poems of different experience and stages of her childhood echo the cicada’s long 17 years of burial and ascension. But the poems do not rise into some hollow holiness or healing. They do not ask for retribution or acceptance. There are no gods to impart forgiveness here either. They are tough, brutal poems really, and they ask only one thing from the reader and from the poet herself; they ask only for straight up, spoken admission. In fact, they demand it:
At nautical dusk you can no longer separate
the present from the past,
terrestrial trace. Admit it,
you know exactly what happened.
(from “Civil, Nautical, Astronomical”)In their frankness, these poems without emotion, without an ounce of romanticism or sentimentality admit the stark reality of a painful past. In “Field of Vision” Millikin objectively states:
… rape opens your eyes
never to close again.
As if studying her past under a microscope and pinning it to a collection of truths the way we pin insects and butterflies, Millikin, as the better poet, is after more than the personal truth. She is mapping out a broader one. A truth that fits more than her own body. And she believes in detailed specifics.
For those who were raised by mothers who did not protect their children from husbands who violated them. Raised by mothers who ignored the truth and punished the child instead of the perpetrator. For those whose silence, anorexia, and truancy was not questioned, but punished instead with more abuse. These poems seek to call and lay out in black and white a broad, more encompassing truth: Details and specifics matter. No one passes ‘go’ unless they can name the poison, name the criminal, and also the weapon that made the wounds. In “Succor” she recalls a trauma that has shaped and directed her life in just such detached, specific detail:
You don’t spend seventy-seven days
in solitary confinement at age fourteen
without the need to say this
is what it was, your fifteenth birthday
in solitary’s
hard human sky.
Where you learned to sing
without a congregation.
As tough as some of these poems are to read, and though some of them leave us flinching, the poet shapes a subject that could easily be sensationalized or sentimentalized, guides it instead into truths that extend beyond the personal into the political. Sprinkled throughout, some truths expose and bleed into the social culture of the American South where “…enslaved sharecroppers are buried in unjust graves…”, and some extend to violent histories as far away as Indonesia even. All the while, the cicadas rise and sing their unremitting song throughout this book, just as these truths are spoken and repeated until they become their own living rhythm and refrain. And if there is any criticism to be had here, one might wish for more poems about how the selfish ignoring of pain and the terrible punishing of innocent truth connect, provide a background music to all social crimes and war. But I will not fault such a creative book for that. I would say the book more than fulfills its goal of acknowledgement and more than pins the truths of a traumatic childhood into a collection. I would also describe these haunting poems exactly as the poet herself has described the cicadas in one of the final poems called “School Shoes”:
…In the cicada’s last singing…
their burning song without fire,
their weighted notes without heft,
neither stay nor vanish
but become the unshod
school of remembrance.
