Jim Miller

Drift : A Novel Jim Miller

Exposes the hollowness of a city's boom yearsJoe Blake is searching for something real in a seemingly depthless world. An alienated, underemployed professor and aspiring poet, Joe roams San Diego in his own personal disquiet and discovers that agony and ecstasy coexist all around him. Joe has fallen in love with Theresa Sanchez, a single mother cultivating her own garden of doubts.

As Joe and Theresa negotiate their intimacy amid bouts of passion and lines of Neruda, they find common ground in their yearning for a more authentic life. But what they later discover along a lonely stretch of highway is almost too real for them to bear. As Drift uncovers the hidden past of this southwestern mecca—a history inhabited by the likes of Emma Goldman, Henry Miller, Mission Indians, and Theosophists—it captures the underlying emptiness and unease of San Diego circa 2000.

Blake plays the postmodern flâneur in a theme-park city, drifting with the poetic eye of Baudelaire and the critical sensibilities of Walter Benjamin and the Situationist avant-garde. Depicting the sex, drugs, and death found in the borderlands, author Jim Miller portrays a city where cultures sometimes clash but more often pass one another almost wholly unaffected. Drift features original art by Perry Vasquez and photography by Jennifer Cost.

A startling work laced with premonitions of dread, Drift is a Whitmanesque journey that puts readers squarely in its moment as it exposes the seamy underside of modern America.