In Jane Miller's fourth collection of poems, August Zero, she often interrupts narrative impulses with jarring juxtapositions and metaphors, associative and dissociative reflections, myth and dream, creating an intensely lyrical language that defies paraphrase. Against an end-of-the-century scenario filled with threats of population explosion and environmental disaster, Miller describes a post-apocalyptic resurrection of consciousness. Judges honoring the book with a Western States Book Award wrote, "With skillful, irrepressible imagination, Jane Miller has written an intelligent, imaginative and evocative book about love. True in both thought and description, August Zero carries the author's sustained vision and intelligence from beginning to end."