Fall Rising: From Exile to Odyssey
Forever Afternoon
What is death to the caterpillar
we call a butterfly. -anon
Ladder of success is an image I abhor.
I prefer the double helix, intertwining spirals.
My spirit does not wear down
or wear out, like a car or a shoe.
While my body wanes, waxes my spirit brighter.
I am in eternal metamorphosis.
Constantly consumed,
I consume myself.
Life has no stages; the word resolution
lies; life has questions, connections.
Life is a wheel of fortune, my life
a gift to be passed around the wheel.
Do we ask where does the caterpillar
go when it becomes a butterfly?
The caterpillar does not go, it becomes.
Spirit of caterpillar lives in butterfly,
same heart, beating stronger.
Readers are loving Fall Rising!
Marilyn Pursley, 96 years old, read Fall Rising and proclaimed that this is the first book she has read in years that made her throw up her hands close to a dozen times and shout, “Those motherf…ers!“
“The book is deeply engaging…You are one helluva writer, Adam, from time to time conveying a paragraph’s worth of meaning with an extremely well-crafted phrase. Your recollections and descriptions are rendered in absolutely sparkling prose.” –Peter Pursley
Here’s what Susan Duhan Felix, Mayor’s Art Ambassador, City of Berkeley, said:
“Fall Rising, by A. D. Miller, is an extraordinary memoir. It is not only a touching personal story, but a first-hand account of history being made. It can be read as a companion to Ticket of Exile, but I believe it also stands alone as an excellent read. I strongly recommend this book.”
Praise for Fall Rising:
” The reader is tempted to see in Miller’s memoir …a “Jim Crow narrative,” recalling, in a relative sense, of course, the “slave narrative” of the late 19th century. Together with Miller’s Ticket to Exile, Fall Rising lays bare a grand and meticulously-remembered American life… Miller writes: “I see now the terrible thing it was to live my life constantly in a defensive mode, or a mode of attack, never for a single moment to be able to breathe easy.” That is, too, the terrible realization of his reader.”
—Peter Buttross, Jr., author of Natchez Cantos: Poems
“Fall Rising is a clear-eyed unsentimental account of a life lived on a tight-rope between the ever- present racial ills of our country and the bone sorrow of personal experience. Adam David Miller’s remembrance of truths about social and educational injustice, love, family, and about how a man made a way out of no way, is inspired and inspiring.”
–Francesca Rochberg, Professor of Near Eastern Studies, UC Berkeley
Fall Rising, by Adam David Miller, is a book of great historical, cultural, psychological and sociological significance. His first memoir, Ticket to Exile, documented the harsh realities of growing up black and poor in the Jim Crow South during the Great Depression and culminated in the aftermath of his passing a seven-word note to a white woman during the first year of World War II. Fall Risingpicks up where Ticket left off, with Miller’s court-ordered exile from South Carolina to New York and a new life. It is both a personal story of sorrow, confusion and ultimate triumph and a people’s ongoing saga from slavery and segregation to civil rights and the hope for a future in which they can equally share.
—Lucille Lang Day, author of The Curvature of Blue and Married at Fourteen
You can purchase his book by clicking this link
