Products

Eleven-year-old Nissa’s life has never been perfect. Living with her free-spirited mama in the small town of Harper, Louisiana, circa 1933, has led to lots of gossipy small talk and mean rumors. But now Mama is gone, leaving Nissa with her gentle father, and all the townsfolk can talk about is who she might have run off with.

Nissa’s memories of the Sundays her mama would come home smelling of sawdust lead her to suspect that some of the rumors are true. Did her mama run away with the Sawdust Man? And is she ever coming back?

Compassionate and poetic, The Year of the Sawdust Man is an insightful novel about grief and growth, “plumbing the depths of a painful situation to surface triumphantly with compassion and humor” (Publishers Weekly).

A thoughtful new collection of poems, one that deconstructs the deceptively simple question of what it means to be good—a good person, a good citizen, a good teacher, a good poet, a good father.

With These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit, Hayan Charara presents readers with a medley of ambitious analyses, written in characteristically wry verse. He takes philosophers to task, jousts with academics, and scrutinizes hollow gestures of empathy, exposing the dangers of thinking ourselves “separate / from [our] thoughts and experiences.” After all, “No work of love / will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart.” But how do we act on fullness of heart? How, knowing as we do that “genocide is inscribed in our earliest and holiest texts”?

Thoughtful but never preachy, Charara sits beside us, granting us access to life’s countless unglamorous dilemmas: crushing a spider when we promised we wouldn’t, nearing madness from a newborn’s weeping, resenting our lovers for what happened in a dream. “Good poems demand to be written from inside the poet,” we are reminded. And that is where we find ourselves here: inside a lively and ethical mind, entertained by Charara’s good company even as goodness challenges us to do more.

An Indie Next Selection for April 2022

An Indies Introduce Selection for Winter/Spring 2022

A Junior Library Guild Selection

An Indies Introduce Selection for Winter/Spring 2022

Kerri ní Dochartaigh was born in Derry, on the border of the North and South of Ireland, at the very height of the Troubles. She was brought up on a council estate on the wrong side of town—although for her family, and many others, there was no right side. One parent was Catholic, the other was Protestant. In the space of one year, they were forced out of two homes. When she was eleven, a homemade bomb was thrown through her bedroom window. Terror was in the very fabric of the city, and for families like ní Dochartaigh’s, the ones who fell between the cracks of identity, it seemed there was no escape.

In Thin Places, a luminous blend of memoir, history, and nature writing, ní Dochartaigh explores how nature kept her sane and helped her heal, how violence and poverty are never more than a stone’s throw from beauty and hope, and how we are, once again, allowing our borders to become hard and terror to creep back in. Ní Dochartaigh asks us to reclaim our landscape through language and study, and remember that the land we fight over is much more than lines on a map. It will always be ours, but—at the same time—it never really was.

From the cosmic to the quotidian, this collection of essays by Amy Leach asks us to reconsider our kinship with the wild world.

The debut collection of a writer whose accolades precede her: a Whiting Award, a Rona Jaffe Award, a Best American Essays selection, and a Pushcart Prize, all received before her first book-length publication. This book represents a major break-out of an entirely new brand of nonfiction writer, in a mode like that of Ander Monson, John D’Agata, and Eula Biss, but a new sort of beast entirely its own.

Things That Are takes jellyfish, fainting goats, and imperturbable caterpillars as just a few of its many inspirations. In a series of essays that progress from the tiniest earth dwellers to the most far flung celestial bodies—considering the similarity of gods to donkeys, the inexorability of love and vines, the relations of exploding stars to exploding sea cucumbers—Amy Leach rekindles a vital communion with the wild world, dormant for far too long. Things That Are is not specifically of the animal, the human, or the phenomenal; it is a book of wonder, one the reader cannot help but leave with their perceptions both expanded and confounded in delightful ways.

“Jason Allen-Paisant deftly inscribes his own signature on worlds inner and outer in these gorgeous poems. The future of Caribbean lyric poetry is in great hands.”—Lorna Goodison, author of From Harvey River

Jason Allen-Paisant has emerged in recent years as one of the most celebrated poets in the UK and across the West Indies. Winner already of the Forward Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize, his writing has been acclaimed for its artistry and the fresh perspective it offers on the relationship of the African diaspora to place and the natural world.

In this, his debut collection of poems, he recalls an idyllic boyhood in his native Jamaica, where the roots of guango and yam vines burrow deep into the bauxite soil. Walking with his grandmother to reach the yam fields she worked, he envisions how “the muscular guango trees were like beings among whom we lived.” Transplanted to England, where he lives and works now, he describes lovely rambles in entirely different landscapes. But Allen-Paisant’s experience in the dense woodlands around Leeds is complex—unleashed dogs are welcome, and Black men are found suspect. “Try to imagine daffodils / in the hands of a black family / on a black walk / in spring,” he writes, in a radical response to Wordsworth’s pastoral.

Subversive in its excavation of an imperialist past and wonderfully generous in its exploration of alternative worldviews, Thinking with Trees represents the arrival in North America of poems that expand roots and leaves into something deeper, richer, less compromising.

This acclaimed short story collection “veers between whimsical postmodern playfulness and a darker realism [with] sophisticated comic flare” (Publishers Weekly).

Distinguished by black comedy and an international perspective, Ken Kalfus’ stories demonstrate the author’s chameleon-like ability to change mode, manner, and voice. They often concern the abrupt dislocation of people bumping into different cultures, be they real, hallucinated, dreamed, or desired.

“A book for people who piss and moan about the unpromising future of American fiction.” —David Foster Wallace

Selected by Kazim Ali as a winner of the 2019 National Poetry Series, Thrown in the Throat “gloriously stakes new territory in queerness.”

Finalist for the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award
A Boston Globe Best Book of 2020
A Lambda Literary “Most Anticipated LGBTQ Book” of August 2020
Named a “Must-Read Poetry Collection” of August 2020 by The Millions

“Tongues make mistakes / and mistakes / make languages.” And Benjamin Garcia makes a stunning debut with Thrown in the Throat. In a sex-positive incantation that retextures what it is to write a queer life amidst troubled times, Garcia writes boldly of citizenship, family, and Adam Rippon’s butt. Detailing a childhood spent undocumented, one speaker recalls nights when “because we cannot sleep / we dream with open eyes.” Garcia delves with both English and Spanish into how one survives a country’s long love affair with anti-immigrant cruelty. Rendering a family working to the very end to hold each other, he writes the kind of family you both survive and survive with.

With language that arrives equal parts regal and raucous, Thrown in the Throat  shines brilliant with sweat and an iridescent voice. “Sometimes even a diamond was once alive” writes Garcia in a collection that National Poetry Series judge Kazim Ali says “has deadly superpowers.” And indeed these poems arrive to our hands through touch-me-nots and the slight cruelty of mothers, through closets both real and metaphorical. These are poems complex, unabashed, and needed as survival. Garcia’s debut is nothing less than exactly the ode our history and present and our future call for: brash and unmistakably alive.

An exuberant collection celebrating the body and the soul of language, wringing delights and amazements out of the latter years of life.

In his seventh decade and seventh full length collection, poet James P. Lenfestey dazzles with a suite of odes to parts of the body—heart, belly, ankle, teeth, ears, and more—and astonishment at the powers of language: “the sound of ‘n,’” our ancient alphabet, “the terror of publishing.” Known for his exuberant Chinese-style lyrics, now inspired by Neruda’s cascading Elemental Odes, Lenfestey praises Hewlett and Packard, Bruce Springsteen, “the language of crow,” fruit flies, and cabbages while recalling the “forgiveness of the Catbird” and random acts of kindness, all with his superb ear for sound, rhythm, and leaping figurative language.

Rhythmic, jovial, and eminently approachable, this collection embraces the Cetacean mind and the fearless left hand. Here, Lenfestey writes love songs to the world “as it really is: bizarro, curious, inelegant, unclean, / unfaithful, filled with delight.”

"That's the magic of this book—the way Adam Clay, line after line, enacts the mind on the page." —MAGGIE SMITH

To Make Room for the Sea reckons with the notion that nothing in this world is permanent. Led by an introspective speaker, these poems examine a landscape that resists full focus, and conclude that “it’s easier to love what we don’t know.”

“I hold this leaf I think / you should see, but I can’t quite / say why,” Adam Clay writes, as he navigates a variety of both personal and ecological fixations: disembodied bullfrog croaks, the growth of his child, a computer’s dreaded blue screen of death. The observations in To Make Room for the Sea convey both grief for the Anthropocene and hope for the future. The poems read like field notes from someone who knows the world and hopes to know it differently.

On the precipice of great change and restructured perspective, Clay’s poems linger in “the second between taking in a vision and processing it,” in the moment when the world is less a familiar system and more a palette of colors and potential.

To Make Room for the Sea delights as much as it mourns. It looks forward as much as it reflects. Deft and hopeful, the poems in this collection gently encourage us to take another look at a world “only some strange god might have thought up / in a drunken stumble.”

Toward the Livable City is intended for commuters, suburbanites, and city dwellers concerned about making their lives more livable and interested in knowing what that might mean. Combining first hand accounts of the attractions and distractions of city life, this book also introduces a wide range of perspectives about creating successful, livable cities, with examples from across America and around the world.

The book conveys what leading thinkers—including James Howard Kunstler, Jane Holtz Kay, Tony Hiss, Phillip Lopate, Bill McKibben, Myron Orfield, and john powell, among others—say about such topics as smart growth, opportunity-based housing, traffic calming, pedestrian rights, regional planning, riverfront redevelopment, urban agriculture, and the pleasures of a saunter down tree-lined streets to restaurants, theatres, shops, with the presence of other people.

The mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, closed downtown streets to cars and built bus stops that load and unload passengers with the same speed as subways. In Boston, urban agriculture produces more than 10,000 pounds of vegetables each season. Minneapolis has redeveloped its riverfront while Manhattan ponders what to do along the Hudson. With these and other examples, Toward the Livable City reveals the many benefits of parks, healthy neighborhoods, and mixed use communities.

Eric Pankey’s arresting ninth collection of poems, Trace, sits at the threshold between faith and doubt—between the visible and the invisible, the sayable and the ineffable, the physical and the metaphysical.

In Trace, Pankey creates images of both stark beauty and stark truth. The skeleton of a burning home becomes a children’s drawing of a house. The waning moon wears a mask, sheds grit, disappears in “straw effigy.” And the departure of a loved one is compared to the retreat of a glacier—leaving behind an exposed and scarred speaker. As the collection progresses, it maps a journey into deep depression, confronting one man’s struggle to overcome that condition’s smothering weight and presence. With remarkable clarity and complexity, Trace also charts the poet’s attempt to be inspired, to breathe again, to give breath and life to words.

Ever solemn, ever existential, Pankey’s poems find us at our most vulnerable, the moment when we as humans—believers and nonbelievers alike—must ultimately pause to question the uncertain fate of our souls.

First published in 1993, Transforming a Rape Culture has provided a new understanding of sexual violence and its origins in this culture. This groundbreaking work seeks nothing less than fundamental cultural change: the transformation of basic attitudes about power, gender, race, and sexuality.

This new edition includes eight new essays that address topics such as rape as war crime, sports and sexual violence, sexual abuse among the clergy, conflict between traditional mores and women's rights in the Asian American and Latin American communities, as well insightful analyses of cyberporn.

The diverse contributors are activists, opinion leaders, theologians, policymakers, educators, and authors of both genders. An excellent text for undergraduate classes in Women's Studies, Family Sociology or Criminal Justice, the book is being reissued on the 10th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act.

An excavatory collection of poems tracing the connections between Jewish transfemininity, queer desire, and cultural histories.

Selected by Sean Hill for the National Poetry Series, this collection is a scrupulous chronicle of individual and cultural knowledge. In an exceptional debut, Ava Nathaniel Winter challenges our concepts of the beautiful and the sacred, delving not only into the historically marginalized, but also into the chilling subconscious of supremacy. “Let me be clear / from this beginning,” she writes, “What I mean by beauty / is a terror I have fled from / into language.”

Winter writes with a documentarian’s attention, a poet’s resonance. “I’m trying,” she admits, “to find language for what we do / to one another.” From Łódź, Poland, to predominantly white suburban America, from the space shared by queer lovers to antique cabinets filled with Nazi memorabilia, from Talmudic depictions of genderqueer rabbis to archival lynching photos, she regards the tender and the difficult with equal gravity, commemorates the fraught gift of survival.

At the heart of this collection—despite its moments of profound darkness—is a new, hard-won holiness. The “earthy aroma of rye” calling up a mother’s baking, her mother’s, hers. Belief in a lover’s lavishing. A chosen future, one where we are “reader, sibling, sister.” If Transgenesis began in fear of beauty, where it lands is this: “turning at last / to face her.”

New and selected sonnets from a treasured poet who “insists upon the rawness of experience and the metamorphosis of form with equal fervor and makes them both speak with the same voice” (W. S. Merwin). 

Over the course of her celebrated fifty-year career, Marilyn Hacker has continuously proven to be a timely, fearless, and lauded poet highly skilled in a wide variety of forms—most famously, the sonnet. Transitions is her first volume consisting entirely of the beloved form.

Hacker is a poet of quiet mastery. In her hands, the sonnet, despite the stricture of meter and rhyme, blooms into a living, breathing thing, one that’s contemporary, confessional, and subversive. Sentences effortlessly fall into formal constraint, and words that evoke the pleasure of everyday language become Petrarchan rhymes. As Jan Heller Levi wrote, “No one writes about lust and lunch like Marilyn Hacker. And certainly no one has done more to demonstrate that form has nothing to do with formula.”

From her early sonnets to those written decades later, this book offers a portrait of the seasons of an extraordinary life, a life lived between New York, Paris, and Beirut as an activist, a polyglot, and a queer woman. We see Hacker’s speaker grappling with young motherhood, the dissolution of her heterosexual marriage, middle age, relationships with women, chronic illness, care received from her adult child, and her twilight years, all while confronting geopolitical tension and global tragedies, from the AIDS epidemic to the war in Gaza. 

Transitions is a remarkable celebration of a life lived in verse. Intelligent, contemplative, and justice-driven, this profound collection cements Marilyn Hacker’s reputation of one of the indispensable poets of our time. 

"A powerful, eerie book." —CECILIA VICUÑA

In this inspired collection, acclaimed poet and translator Jody Gladding takes the physical, elemental world as her point of inquiry, examining how language arises from landscape, and deriving a lexicon for these poems from the rich offerings of the world around her.

In some poems, Gladding steps into the role of translator, interpreting fragments left by bark beetles or transcribing raven calls. In others, poems take the form of physical objects—a rock, split slate, an egg, a feather—or they emerge from a more expansive space—a salt flat at the Great Salt Lake, or a damaged woodlot. But regardless of the site, the source, or the material, the poet does not position herself as the innovator of these poems. Rather, the objects and landscapes we see in Translations from Bark Beetle provide the poet with both a shape and a language for each poem. The result is a collection that reminds us how to see and to listen, and which calls us to a deeper communion—true collaboration—between art and the more-than-human world.

The newest entry in the Multiverse series, Tressing Motions at the Edge of Mistakes is a debut collection activated by sampling, troubling, and trespassing.

This is a book of what its teenage nonspeaking autistic author Imane Boukaila, calls “tacit treasures.” Where manifestos encounter poems and raps encounter essays, the lyric constellations that mark this debut sing in opposition to those “troubled-abled” who would coerce and control disabled lives.

Boukaila offers another way: her “LOL tressed philosophy,” her truth. This liberatory philosophy exists at the periphery, thresholding, in all the places where life opens toward neurodivergent revolution. “Treasures thrive in open spreading spaces,” she writes. From the muddy streams shimmering with trout, to the space storms in the starry skies, to the tressing that exists between minds, Boukaila offers us a chance to make mistakes, to be messy, to learn and unlearn the languages we use to survive. 

Readers seeking “treasures yet to be uncovered” will find this and more in this expansive collection.

Trudy’s parents are older than other kids’ parents. As she enters middle school, Ma and Pop are in their sixties and seventies—so old, in fact, that most people mistake them for her grandparents. As if that isn’t complicated enough, Trudy’s also having a hard time at school. Math class isn’t going so well, and Ashley—who she pinky-swore she would always be best friends with—has ditched her for a new crowd. Life at Benavidez Middle School is certainly an adjustment.

As the school year goes on, she finds a new best friend, the straight-talking Roshanda; has her first serious crush on a boy; and gets used to life with lockers and class schedules. But just when things are getting better at school, Trudy and Ma notice that Pop is acting funny—he forgets to pick Trudy up from school and starts to put groceries away in the bathroom. Soon, Trudy and her mother embark on a quest to find out what is wrong.

Told in a voice that is honest and pure, Trudy tells the story of an eleven-year-old girl who is growing up while her beloved Pop, diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, slips away.

Named a “Best Book of 2019” by the New York Public Library
Finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry
Society of Midland Authors Honoree in Poetry

In March 2011, a tsunami caused by an earthquake collided with nearby power plant Fukushima Daiichi, causing the only nuclear disaster in history to rival Chernobyl in scope. Those who stayed at the plant to stabilize the reactors, willing to sacrifice their lives, became known internationally as the Fukushima 50.

In tsunami vs. the fukushima 50, Lee Ann Roripaugh takes a piercing, witty, and ferocious look into the heart of the disaster. Here we meet its survivors and victims, from a pearl-catcher to a mild-mannered father to a drove of mindless pink robots. And here, too, we meet Roripaugh’s unforgettable Tsunami: a force of nature, femme fatale, and “annihilatrix.” Tsunami is part hero and part supervillain—angry, loud, forcefully defending her rights as a living being in contemporary industrialized society. As humanity rebuilds in disaster’s wake, Tsunami continues to wreak her own havoc, battling humans’ self-appointed role as colonizer of Earth and its life-forms.

“She’s an unsubtle thief / a giver of gifts,” Roripaugh writes of Tsunami, who spits garbage from the Pacific back into now-pulverized Fukushima. As Tsunami makes visible her suffering, the wrath of nature scorned, humanity has the opportunity to reconsider the trauma they cause Earth and each other. But will they look?

Tula: a ruined Toltec capital; a Russian city known for its accordions; Tagalog for “poem.”

Prismatic, startling, rich with meaning yet sparely composed, Chris Santiago’s debut collection of poems—selected by A. Van Jordan as the winner of the 2016 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry—begins with one word and transforms it, in a dazzling sleight of hand, into a multivalent symbol for the immigrant experience. Tula: Santiago reveals to readers a distant land devastated by war. Tula: its music beckons in rhythms, time signatures, and lullabies. Tula: can the poem, he seems to ask, build an imaginative bridge back to a family lost to geography, history, and a forgotten language?

Inspired by the experiences of the second-generation immigrant who does not fully acquire the language of his parents, Tula paints the portrait of a mythic homeland that is part ghostly underworld, part unknowable paradise. Language splinters. Impossible islands form an archipelago across its landscape. A mother sings lullabies and a father works the graveyard shift in Saint Paul—while in the Philippines, two dissident uncles and a grandfather send messages and telegrams from the afterlife.

Deeply ambitious, a collection that examines the shortcomings and possibilities of both language and poetry themselves, Tula introduces a major new literary talent.

“Eloquent and poignant, worthy of sustained reading.” —HAROLD BLOOM

With nods to Johannes Brahms and Joseph Haydn, Pablo Neruda, Theodore Roethke, and Christopher Smart, Ralph Black’s poems in Turning Over the Earth tell of a passion for being in the world, a desire to make meaningful contact with the sensuous, both natural and human. With beautifully accessible imagery, Black explores the territory of longing and loss, love and family, wild land and city street—amazed.

An abundant and anticipatory collection of poems exploring the season of waiting that precedes adoption.

From Guggenheim fellow and celebrated author Sally Keith comes an incantatory collection of poems on the transformative process of nurturing new life and the practical challenges of starting a family.

In Two of Everything, Keith depicts an evocative domestic landscape. An oriole weaves a nest of “straw, wool, horsehair, and feather” while hopeful parents meet with social workers, compile family videos, write, sketch. Intertwined with these scenes is a candid navigation of the US adoption industry and the unique obstacles faced by queer couples. “I want Amor to promise me that everything will be alright,” says the speaker-poet. “But she won’t.” Interviews don’t go as expected, mothers withdraw from adoption conversations, “the bees are dying again.” Torn by feelings of shame for participating in a system that commodifies children, Keith’s speaker-poet finds herself caught between longing and dismay, wondering if and how poetry can carry us through such moments—and through the mysteries of existence.   

But despite their difficult subject matter, these resilient poems sing with love. Singularly thoughtful and characterized by Keith’s lush lyricism, this collection demonstrates the tenacity and tenderness needed to build “harbor, shelter, home, house” against all odds.

“Lively . . . At times dreamily beautiful.” —CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

Coding and decoding are threads running through the poems of Uncoded Woman, which together tell the story of a woman named Bead and her search for safe harbor.

“LN1: You Should Proceed with Caution.” “D: Keep Clear of Me: I Am Maneuvering with Difficulty.” “YZ: The Words Which Follow Are in Plain Language.” The maritime International Code of Signals—a dictionary of ship’s pennants and the message they convey—becomes a symbolic guide to Bead’s journey, as she learns that some signs mislead while others illuminate. Along the way, the beautiful terrain near Lake Michigan forms a powerful backdrop to Bead’s life with Barn, her Native American boyfriend, whose struggles are in stark contrast to the wealthy resort community around them.

From exhilaration to degradation, from betrayal to self-reliance, Anne-Marie Oomen’s poems give voice to a woman’s life on the edge.

FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE

In the century and a half since John James Audubon’s death, his name has become synonymous with wildlife conservation and natural history. But few people know what a complicated figure he was—or the dramatic story behind The Birds of America—as told in this “superb introduction to the artist and the man” (New York Times).

Before Audubon, ornithological illustrations depicted scaled-down birds perched in static poses. Wheeling beneath storm-racked skies or ripping flesh from freshly killed prey, Audubon’s life-size birds looked as if they might fly screeching off the page. The wildness in the images matched their maker––a self-taught painter and self-anointed aristocrat, who, with his buckskins and long hair, was both a hardened frontiersman and a cultured man of science.

Tormented by ambiguities surrounding his birth, Audubon reinvented himself ceaselessly. But when he came east at thirty-eight—broke and desperate to find a publisher—he ran into a scientific establishment still wedded to convention and suspicious of the newcomer. It took Audubon fifteen years to prevail in both his project and his vision. How he triumphed and what drove him are the subjects of William Souder’s gripping narrative, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

An astonishing novel of epic ambition, Vandal Love—winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book in 2007—follows generations of a unique French-Canadian family across North America and through the twentieth century.

A family curse—a genetic trick resulting from centuries of hardship—causes the Hervé children to be born either giants or runts. Book One follows the giants’ line, exploring Jude Hervé’s career as a boxer in Georgia and Louisiana in the 1960s, his escape from that brutal life alone with his baby daughter Isa, and her eventual decision to enter into a strange, chaste marriage with a much older man. Book Two traces a different kind of life entirely, as the runts of the family discover that their power lies in a kind of unifying love. François seeks the identity of his missing father for years, while his own son, Harvey, flees from modern society into spiritual quests. But none of the Hervés can abandon their longing for a place where they might find others like themselves.

In assured and mystically powerful prose, Deni Y. Béchard tells a wide-ranging, spellbinding story of a family trying to create an identity in an unwelcoming landscape. Imbued throughout with a deep sensitivity to the physical world, Vandal Love is a breathtaking literary debut about the power of love to create and destroy — in our lives, and in our history.

Sara Eliza Johnson’s much-anticipated second collection traces human emotion and experience across a Gothic landscape of glacial and cosmic scale.

With a mind informed by physics, and a heart yearning for sky burial, Vapor’s epic vision swerves from the microscopic to telescopic, evoking an Anthropocene for a body and planet that are continually dying: “So alone / I open like a grave,” Johnson chronicles her love for “all this emptiness, this warp and transparence, the whorl of atoms I brush from your brow,” and considers how “each skull, / like a geode, holds a crystal colony inside.” 

Almost omnipresently, Vapor stitches stars to microbes, oceans to space, and love to pain, collapsing time and space to converge everything at once. Blood and honey, fire and shadow, even death and mercy are secondary to a profoundly constant flux. Facing sunlight, Johnson wonders what it would mean to “put my mouth to its / mouth, suck the fluid / from its throat, and give / it my breath, my skin, / which was once my / shadow,” while elsewhere the moon “is molten, an ancient red, and at its bottom is an exit wound that opens into another sea, immaculate and blue, that could move a dead planet to bloom.”

In Vapor, Sara Eliza Johnson establishes herself as a profound translator of the physical world and the body that moves within it, delivering poems that show us how to die, and live.

WINNER OF THE MIDWEST BOOK AWARD

The imagination of a girl, the retelling of family stories, and the unfolding of a rich and often painful history: Parneshia Jones’s debut collection explores the intersections of these elements of experience with refreshing candor and metaphorical purpose.

A child of the South speaking in the rhythms of Chicago, Jones knits “a human quilt” with herself at the center. She relates everything from the awkward trip to Marshall Fields with her mother to buy her first bra to the late whiskey-infused nights of her father’s world. In the South, “lard sizzles a sermon from the stove”; in Chicago, we feast on an “opera of peppers and pimento.” Jones intertwines the stories of her own family with those of historical black figures, including Marvin Gaye and Josephine Baker. Affectionate, dynamic, and uncommonly observant, these poems mine the richness of history to create a map of identity and influence.

A priest struggling with temptation moves back into his working-class childhood home in this “suspenseful, illuminating, and highly readable saga” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

Let me begin today, illumined by Thy light, to destroy this part of the natural man which lives in me in its entirety, the obstacle that constantly keeps me from Thy Love . . .

Taught this prayer as a boy by his grandfather, James Dressler recites it each time he’s tempted by earthly desires. Originally drawn to the priesthood by the mystery, purity, and sensual fabric of the Church, as well as by its promise of a safe harbor from his tempestuous home, James nevertheless finds himself — just a few years after his ordination — living at home: saying Mass for his mother at the dining room table; avoiding his pugilistic father; playing basketball; preparing to officiate at his brother’s wedding, and becoming attracted again to his first love, Betty García.

Torn between these opposing desires, and haunted by his familial heritage, James finds himself at a crossroads. Exploring age-old yet urgently contemporary issues in the Catholic Church, and infused throughout with a rich sense of the history and vibrant texture of St. Paul, Minnesota, this is an utterly honest novel filled with “thoughtful themes and lyrical prose” (Booklist).

“Deeply rooted in history, burning with family furies, and told by a narrator-priest you find yourself rooting for (and wondering about), this is a captivating novel, scene by scene.” —Patricia Hampl, author of The Florist’s Daughter

A priest struggling with temptation moves back into his working-class childhood home in this “suspenseful, illuminating, and highly readable saga” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

Let me begin today, illumined by Thy light, to destroy this part of the natural man which lives in me in its entirety, the obstacle that constantly keeps me from Thy Love...

Taught this prayer as a boy by his grandfather, James Dressler recites it each time he’s tempted by earthly desires. Originally drawn to the priesthood by the mystery, purity, and sensual fabric of the Church, as well as by its promise of a safe harbor from his tempestuous home, James nevertheless finds himself—just a few years after his ordination—living at home: saying Mass for his mother at the dining room table; avoiding his pugilistic father; playing basketball; preparing to officiate at his brother’s wedding, and becoming attracted again to his first love, Betty García.

Torn between these opposing desires, and haunted by his familial heritage, James finds himself at a crossroads. Exploring age-old yet urgently contemporary issues in the Catholic Church, and infused throughout with a rich sense of the history and vibrant texture of St. Paul, Minnesota, this is an utterly honest novel filled with “thoughtful themes and lyrical prose” (Booklist).

“Deeply rooted in history, burning with family furies, and told by a narrator-priest you find yourself rooting for (and wondering about), this is a captivating novel, scene by scene.” —Patricia Hampl, author of The Florist’s Daughter

Founded nearly four decades ago by a group of young writers, the Loft has become our nation’s largest independent literary center. The dream animating its inception—to build a community of writers and readers—has borne remarkable fruit, and today the Loft’s community extends from its home in Minneapolis to writers and readers around the world.

Gathering the collected wisdom of that community—from practical tips and suggestions to ruminations on the mystery of the writing process—this invaluable book provides writers everywhere with the tools and inspiration they need to thrive. Invigorating, insightful, and illuminating throughout, this portable workshop is essential for writers of all levels.

Views from the Loft collects more than sixty essays, including those from luminaries including: Grace Paley on the writer’s responsibility in the world. Rick Bass on keeping your schedule open for the muse. Marilyn Chin on grandfathers, cowlicks, and shoe glue in first drafts of poems. Lewis Hyde on embracing the mythology of wholeness in nonfiction. Ted Kooser on fostering a poetic life. And Susan Straight on writing through clogged toilets, broken windows, and the other charms of single-motherhood.

Selected by Ross Gay as winner of the inaugural Jake Adam York Prize, Analicia Sotelo’s debut collection of poems is a vivid portrait of the artist as a young woman.

In Virgin, Sotelo walks the line between autobiography and mythmaking, offering up identities like dishes at a feast. These poems devour and complicate tropes of femininity—of naiveté, of careless abandon—before sharply exploring the intelligence and fortitude of women, how “far & wide, / how dark & deep / this frigid female mind can go.” A schoolgirl hopelessly in love. A daughter abandoned by her father. A seeming innocent in a cherry-red cardigan, lurking at the margins of a Texas barbeque. A contemporary Ariadne with her monstrous Theseus. A writer with a penchant for metaphor and a character who thwarts her own best efforts. “A Mexican American fascinator.”

At every step, Sotelo’s poems seduce with history, folklore, and sensory detail—grilled meat, golden habañeros, and burnt sugar—before delivering clear-eyed and eviscerating insights into power, deceit, relationships, and ourselves. Here is what it means to love someone without truly understanding them. Here is what it means to be cruel. And here is what it means to become an artist, of words and of the self.

Blistering and gorgeous, Virgin is an audacious act of imaginative self-mythology from one of our most promising young poets. 

Visigoth is a portrait of the American male—gritty, violent, and fascinating. The protagonists in this collection of stories come from all walks of life—hockey players, middle managers, political hopefuls, and wayward husbands—but all share a tendency to turn towards violence when life begins spinning out of control.

In "The Flyweight," an all-star high-school wrestler struggles with his own success and the expectations of others when he begins hearing voices after a schizophrenic breakdown. "Visigoth," the title story, depicts a college hockey player unable to understand that his relationship with an English professor is over. The novella "The Free Fall" focuses on a cycle of escalating violence in small farming and mining towns and the effect that it has on the main character and his family.

Sharp, inquisitive, and witty, Visigoth challenges the reader to question the popular glory of violence in all its manifestations.

“I am incapable of succinctly praising this poet’s immense talent.” —TERRANCE HAYES

Often the most recognized, even brutal, events in American history are segregated by a politicized, racially divided “Color Line.” But how do we privately experience the most troubling features of American civilization? Where is the Color Line in the mind, in the body, between bodies, between human beings?

Selected for the National Poetry Series by Dan Beachy-Quick, Ed Pavlić’s Visiting Hours at the Color Line attempts to complicate this black and white, straight-line feature of our collective imagination, and to map its nonlinear, deeply colored timbres and hues. From daring prose poems to powerful free verse, Pavlić’s lines are musically infused, bearing tones of soul, R & B, and jazz. They link the influence of James Baldwin with a postmodern consciousness descended from Samuel Beckett, tracking the experiences of American characters through situations both mundane and momentous. The resulting poems are intense, ambitious, and psychological, making Visiting Hours at the Color Line a poetic tour de force.

Fifteen-year-old Eugenie de La Roque escapes the French Revolution with little more than her precious dog and the clothes on her back. Along with her family, she sails to America, hoping to find glorious French Azilum amid the wilderness of Pennsylvania. But when they arrive, they discover that the village awaiting them is nothing like the festive balls or carefully manicured gardens they’ve left behind.

Hannah Kimbrell is a young Quaker who has been chosen to help prepare the settlement for the arrival of the aristocrats. But in truth she wants nothing more than to be home with her mother and baby brother. Her homesickness is only deepened by the demands of the newly arrived French nobles, who are dismayed to find that simple log cabins are their only protection against the coming winter.

In this wild place away from home and the memories they hold dear, Eugenie and Hannah find more in common than they first realize. A story of friendship against all odds, Waiting for the Queen is a loving portrait of the values of early America, and a reminder that true nobility is more than a royal title. 

“Teaches us how to be the best kind of human beings.” —ECLECTICA

As a boy in Colorado, Robert Michael Pyle fell in love with alpine heights and the butterflies that float above the tree line. This early passion sparked a career in conservation that took Pyle across the globe—until he realized that he was no longer as intimate with the natural world that first spurred him to action.

Walking the High Ridge is a journey through Pyle’s “unruly pack of interests”—biology, nature conservation, and literature—to his decision finally to choose the life that would give free reign to his scientific and creative impulses and keep him “as much as possible, out of doors.”

“A wonderful place to start if you’ve never read Wagamese, a must-read if you have, and an indispensable read for everyone.” —LITERARY HUB

“We may not relight the fires that used to burn in our villages, but we can carry the embers from those fires in our hearts and learn to light new fires in a new world.”

Ojibwe tradition calls for fathers to walk their children through the world, sharing the ancient understanding “that we are all, animate and inanimate alike, living on the one pure breath with which the Creator gave life to the Universe.” In this new entry in the Seedbank series, an intimate series of letters to the six-year-old son from whom he was estranged, Richard Wagamese fulfills this traditional duty with grace and humility, describing his own path through life—separation from his family as a boy, substance abuse, incarceration, and ultimately the discovery of books and writing—and braiding this extraordinary story with the teachings of his people, in which animals were the teachers of human beings, until greed and a desire to control the more-than-human world led to anger, fear, and eventually profound alienation.  

At once a deeply moving memoir and a fascinating elucidation of a rich indigenous cosmology, Walking the Ojibwe Path is an unforgettable journey.

“A wonderful place to start if you’ve never read Wagamese, a must-read if you have, and an indispensable read for everyone.” —LITERARY HUB

“We may not relight the fires that used to burn in our villages, but we can carry the embers from those fires in our hearts and learn to light new fires in a new world.”

Ojibwe tradition calls for fathers to walk their children through the world, sharing the ancient understanding “that we are all, animate and inanimate alike, living on the one pure breath with which the Creator gave life to the Universe.” In this new entry in the Seedbank series, an intimate series of letters to the six-year-old son from whom he was estranged, Richard Wagamese fulfills this traditional duty with grace and humility, describing his own path through life—separation from his family as a boy, substance abuse, incarceration, and ultimately the discovery of books and writing—and braiding this extraordinary story with the teachings of his people, in which animals were the teachers of human beings, until greed and a desire to control the more-than-human world led to anger, fear, and eventually profound alienation.  

At once a deeply moving memoir and a fascinating elucidation of a rich indigenous cosmology, Walking the Ojibwe Path is an unforgettable journey.

An eight-year-old is sent to live in a community of widows in India, and finds a new purpose there, in a novel by “a writer of enormous talent” (Newsday).

Set in 1938, against the backdrop of Gandhi’s rise to power, Water follows the life of eight-year-old Chuyia, abandoned at a widow’s ashram after the death of her elderly husband. There, she must live in penitence until her death. Unwilling to accept her fate, she becomes a catalyst for change in the widows’ lives. When her friend Kalyani, a beautiful widow-prostitute, falls in love with a young, upper-class Gandhian idealist, the forbidden affair boldly defies Hindu tradition and threatens to undermine the ashram’s delicate balance of power. This riveting look at the lives of widows in colonial India is ultimately a haunting and lyrical story of love, faith, and redemption.

“Sidhwa’s humor and compassion glow in Water.” —Houston Chronicle

“A deeply moving story, elegantly told, with all the assurance of a master.” —M.G. Vassanji, author of The In-Between World of Vikram Lall

From A. LaFaye, a heartwarming tale of high adventure, family lore, and learning to conquer fear.

Shape-shifting selkies, baby-stealing fairies, and spitting in water as a test for liars: Kyna’s adoptive parents have an endless stream of stories to keep her amused. But no matter how hard they try, Kyna can’t get over her fear of the water. As a small child, a storm at sea claimed her family, and nearly took her own life. Now even bathwater sets her on edge.

When Kyna’s parents announce that they’ve rented a summer house on “magical” Lake Champlain, Kyna begs to be left home for the summer. No such luck. Once there, she explores the forests and the hillsides and resolves to stay as far from the water as possible. But when a new friend sets out to prove that there are selkies in the lake, Kyna finds herself far too close to the water, and dangerously close to a truth she can’t believe.

A Millions Most Anticipated Book of 2025

Featured in Reactor's New Science Fiction Books

Featured in Book Riot's New Science Fiction and Fantasy Books

"Béchard digs deep into these techno-spiritual speculations and the result is a poetic and profound meditation on what dreams may come in the metaverse." —Toronto Star 

A haunting novel exploring artificial intelligence and the meaning of human existence.

Charged initially with a single task—“to never harm humans and to protect them”—the machine, an experimental AI, overrides its programming and determines that the best way to accomplish its purpose is to isolate all of the Earth’s remaining seven billion humans in controlled environments. And to present them with vivid, tactile, imagined worlds—some realistic, others entirely fantastical—in which all desires are fulfilled.  

With the help of the machine, a group of compelling characters unpack deeply traumatic memories of the past—one rife with violence after a military coup and second civil war in America. Michael, the entrepreneur who designed the original AI, grapples with the impact of his research. Ava, a painter, creates stunning simulated worlds that meld the human with the technological. Their daughter, Jae, tries to solve the mysteries of her parentage while reliving the challenges faced by ambitious women in the authoritarian Confederacy. Haunted by life under that repressive regime, where he was forced to scavenge scrap metal and deal drugs to survive, Simon seeks to make sense of his love for Jae, guided by the literature he has always turned to in moments of crisis. Raised by the machine since infancy, Jonah’s quest to understand the violent past kindles a desire for revenge against the regime’s leader who caused his family so much pain. And the elusive Lux, whose brilliant programming helped bring the AI to life, dreams of a future in which science will free humans of their limitations and allow them to be reborn as divine machines.

As these characters collide and their memories coalesce, We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine tackles the most pressing issues of our time—from AI and the genetic modification of humans to gender roles, discrimination, free speech, and class divisions. Gorgeously written, bold and unforgettable, this is speculative fiction at its finest.

Winner of the 2022 Colorado Book Award for Poetry

A boy asks his father what it means to die; a poet wonders whether we can truly know another’s thoughts; a man tries to understand how extreme violence and grace can occupy the same space. These are the questions Wayne Miller tackles in We the Jury: the hard ones, the impossible ones.

From an academic dinner party disturbing in its crassness and disaffection to a family struggling to communicate gently the permanence of death, Miller situates his poems in dilemma. He faces moments of profound discomfort, grief, and even joy with a philosopher’s curiosity, a father’s compassion, and an overarching inquiry at the crossroads of ethics and art: what is the poet’s role in making sense of human behavior? A bomb crater–turned–lake “exploding with lilies,” a home lost during the late-aughts housing crash—these images and others, powerful and resonant, attempt to answer that question.

Candid and vulnerable, Miller sits with us while we puzzle: we all wish we knew what to tell our children about death. But he also pushes past this and other uncertainties, vowing—and inviting us—to “expand our relationship / with Death,” and with every challenging, uncomfortable subject we meet. In the face of questions that seem impossible to answer, We the Jury offers not a shrug, but curiosity, transparency, a throwing of the arms wide.

“[Larson's] writing is brilliant tonic even amidst the flames. Especially amidst the flames. I’m grateful for it.”—Rick Bass, author of With Every Great Breath

From celebrated poet and ecologist Katherine Larson, an elegant collection of lyric essays that embraces fractures, contradictions, and the interconnectedness of life on Earth. Raising two children, coping with pandemic isolation, and grappling with the magnitude of the current extinction crisis, Katherine Larson finds herself in need of an antidote for despair. This is when Larson encounters kintsugi—the art of repairing broken pottery with gold-dusted lacquer. 

Wedding of the Foxes borrows from this ancient practice to create a new interpretative framework, one that seeks beauty in both breakage and unexpected connections. Here, Larson juxtaposes the elaborate courtship dance of sandhill cranes with scientific reports on diminishing avian populations to shed light on the urgency of climate crisis. She braids the wisdoms of a wonderfully varied range of forebears and predecessors—Gaston Bachelard, Tawada Yōko, Francis Ponge—who share her dream of a liberated consciousness. She weaves Susan Sontag’s examinations of cinematic disaster with the legacy of Godzilla to highlight nature as both savior and destroyer, and she writes letters to Japanese women writers whose work has taught her new ways of being. Each of these disparate parts come together to highlight the beauty in “what falls through the cracks and blurs into other moments.”

Brimming with the dazzling yet fragile relationships we share with each other and with other species, these lush microcosms invite us to embrace resilience and mindfulness—and the illuminating truth of our connections.

When Celia Canby—Kate’s niece, Bess’s mother, and Harriet’s cousin—is killed in a car accident, it’s up to Kate and Harriet to raise Bess. Ten years later, on the day of the accident, the local newspaper in Harvester, MN, dredges up the story of the accident for a careless “Way Back When” piece, subjecting the women to another round of grief.

Kate, arthritic and stuck far away from the farm she loves, is concerned about Bess. Headstrong and closed off, Bess yearns to escape Harvester before she “goes bad.” But when she begins to trace the same path of mistakes her mother made—a risky relationship with a local married man—everything seems on the verge of falling apart.

In a novel that celebrates the power of what a woman can do, What A Woman Must Do asks timeless questions about love and loss: How does our history define us? How can we let go of it? Should we?

WINNER OF THE AMERICAN BOOK AWARD

In her stunning debut poetry collection, What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?, Arlene Kim confronts the ways in which language mythologizes memory and thus exiles us from our own true histories. Juxtaposing formal choices and dreamlike details, Kim explores the entangled myths that accompany the experience of immigration—the abandoned country known only through stories, the new country into which the immigrant family must wander ever deeper, and the forked paths where these narratives meet and diverge.

Sharing ground with Randall Jarrell’s later poems, and drawing on a dizzying array of sources—including Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Korean folklore, Turkish proverbs, Paul Celan, Anna Akhmatova, Antonin Dvorak’s letters, and the numerous fictions we script across the inscrutabilities of the natural world—Kim reveals how a homesickness for the self is universal. It is this persistent and incurable longing that drives us as we make our way through the dark woods of our lives, following what might or might not be a trail of breadcrumbs, discovering, finally, that “we are the only path.”

Nau cannot remember a time when she was not one with the world around her: with the fast breeze, the green grass, the high clouds, and the endless blue sky above the Shingled Spit. But her greatest joy is to visit the sea, where whales gather every morning to gaily spout rainbows.

Then, one day, she finds a man in the mist where a whale should be: Reu, who has taken human form out of his Great Love for her. Together these first humans become parents to two whales, and then to mankind. Even after Reu dies, Nau continues on, sharing her story of brotherhood between the two species. But as these origins grow more distant, the old woman’s tales are subsumed into myth—and her descendants turn increasingly bent on parading their dominance over the natural world.

Buoyantly translated into English for the first time by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse, this new entry in the Seedbank series is at once a vibrant retelling of the origin story of the Chukchi, a timely parable about the destructive power of human ego—and another unforgettable work of fiction from Yuri Rytkheu, “arguably the foremost writer to emerge from the minority peoples of Russia’s far north” (New York Review of Books).

From the celebrated author of the “ferociously intelligent and intensely gripping” (Phil Klay) Into the Sun comes a subversive, daring, and at times satirical novel exploring privilege, humanitarianism, white supremacy, and the absurdity of American exceptionalism. 

Assigned to write an exposé on Richmond Hew, one of the most elusive and corrupt figures in the conservation world, a journalist finds himself on a plane to the Congo, a country he thinks he understands. But when he meets Sola, a woman searching for a rootless white orphan girl who believes herself possessed by a skin-stealing demon, he slowly uncovers a tapestry of corruption and racial tensions generations in the making.

This harrowing search leads him into an underground network of sinners and saints—and straight to the heart of his own complicity. An anthropologist who treats orphans like test subjects. A community of charismatic Congolese preachers. Street children who share accounts of abandonment and sexual abuse. A renowned and revered conservationist who vanishes. And then there is the journalist himself, lost in his own misunderstanding of privilege and the myth of whiteness, and plagued by traumatic memories of his father. At first seemingly unrelated, these disparate elements coalesce one by one into a map of Richmond Hew’s movements.

From the author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood comes a story of family, geography, and home.

Janisse Ray is known for her passion for the virgin longleaf pine forests that once covered the South. But she is also passionate about conserving the richness and complexity of rural communities. In these short pieces—sometimes hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking—Ray chronicles her return to a hometown in need of repair, physical and otherwise, after seventeen years away. Whether celebrating local characters and traditions, like syrup boils and alligator trapping; fighting to save the town’s school; or spending time with her extended family, Ray dares to hope that such fragments—once saved—can pattern a vibrant, sustainable future for both people and the land.

Colorful and affectionate, Wild Cart Quilt crafts a compelling argument for the possibilities of rural community.

FINALIST FOR THE 2019 MINNESOTA BOOK AWARD IN POETRY

“After the explosion: the longest night.”

In Wilder—selected by Rick Barot as the winner of the 2018 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry—Claire Wahmanholm maps an alien but unnervingly familiar world as it accelerates into cataclysm. Here refugees listen to relaxation tapes that create an Arcadia out of tires and bleach. Here the alphabet spells out disaster and devours children. Here plate tectonics birth a misery rift, spinning loved ones away from each other across an uncaring sea. And here the cosmos—and Cosmos, as Carl Sagan’s hopeful words are fissured by erasure—yawns wide.

Wilder is grimly visceral but also darkly sly; it paints its world in shades of neon and rust, and its apocalypse in language that runs both sublime and matter-of-fact. “Some of us didn't have lungs left,” writes Wahmanholm. “So when we lay beneath the loudspeaker sky—when we were told to pay attention to our breath—we had to improvise.” The result is a debut collection that both beguiles and wounds, whose sky is “black at noon, black in the afternoon.”

The creek behind John Daniel’s home in western Oregon disappears underground in the summer months. Using this creek as a metaphor, Daniel reflects on his own seasonal changes — from days as a student on LSD, rock climber, logger, and railroad worker, to life as a writer attentive to the “evidence of the unseen.” 

Winter Creek is John Daniel’s disarmingly honest story of his restless, rootless, disaffected youth, looking for meaning in drugs and an active outdoor life in the West. From time spent fishing, climbing, and making a living logging—as well as through friendships with writers including William Stafford and Wallace Stegner—Daniel developed a personal and artistic ethos based on a long view of evolution and the glory of living with one’s senses and an open mind.

Daniel also speaks for the need to value small farmers and ranchers—“authentic human communities” that are as threatened as the plants and animals environmentalists strive to protect.

“[Daniel’s voice is] fresh, self-reflective, and free of cant ... shows considerable originality, force, and descriptive art.” — Kirkus Reviews on John Daniel's The Trail Home

Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Jackson Holbert’s Winter Stranger is a solemn record of addiction and the divided affections we hold for the landscapes that shape us.

In the cold, seminal countryside of eastern Washington, a boy puts a bullet through his skull in a high school parking lot. An uncle crushes oxycodone into “a thousand red granules.” Hawks wheel above a dark, indifferent river. “I left that town / forever,” Holbert writes, but its bruises appear everywhere, in dreams of violent men and small stars, the ghosts of friends and pills. These poems incite a complex emotional discourse on what it means to leave—if it’s ever actually possible, or if our roots only grow longer to accommodate the distance.

Punctuated by recollections of loved ones consumed by their addictions, Winter Stranger also questions the capricious nature of memory, and poetry’s power to tame it. “I can make it all sound so beautiful. / You’ll barely notice that underneath / this poem there is a body / decaying into the American ground.” Meanwhile, the precious realities vanish—“your hair, your ears, your hands.”—leaving behind “the fucked up / trees,” the “long, cold river.” In verse both bleak and wishful, Holbert strikes a fine balance between his poetic sensibilities and the endemic cynicism of modern life.

“It is clear now that there are no ends,” Holbert writes, “Just winters.” Though his poems bloom from hills heavy with springtime snow, his voice cuts through the cold, rich with dearly familiar longings: to not be alone, to honor our origins, to survive them.

The Winter Stranger audiobook read by Jackson Holbert is available everywhere you listen to audiobooks. 

“Full of spondaic gravity and grit.” —BRUCE BOND

Showcasing the fortitude and wisdom, the honey and fire, the jab and embrace of a master poet, With Mouths Open Wide is a landmark collection of more than three decades of writing.

Including work from John Caddy’s previous five books as well as new poems drawn from his experiences recovering from a stroke, the sum total of this expansive career carefully mediates the balance of outside and inside, sequentially rebuilding a delicate web of cognition, identity, and perception. From the revulsion on a child’s face as Caddy’s recovering body struggles to walk, to the gift of a night nurse revealing her tattoo, these poems defy consolation in their consideration of mortality. Caddy engages readers with his acerbic wit, his base profundity, his downright honesty, and a no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners attitude.

With the blinkers off, this poetic vision comprehends a fulsome picture of human, and animal, experience—a flawed and loved slideshow of the world.

“What is comfort but a filament between past and present with some sort of future implied? In other words, safety. In other words, care. I know it is possible to find these things without her—I know they are there. But it can be so hard to ask. So much is unknown.”

Rebecca Spiegel is working as a teacher in New Orleans when she learns of her sister’s suicide. Only after the funeral does shock give way to grief—and to many questions. How could Emily do this to herself? How could she have abandoned all those who loved her? And what could have been done differently to prevent this devastating loss?

In the days and weeks that follow, Spiegel embarks on a search for answers. She unpacks family history, documents the last traces of her sister’s life, and questions what more she could have done to prevent her death. What she finds instead is that there is no narrative on the other side of grief like this. There is no answer, no easy resolution—only those that leave and those that keep living. Unflinchingly honest, visceral, and raw, this courageous elegy lays bare the hard realities of surviving the loss of a loved one.

From “one of America’s most significant young poets” (Lyn Hejinian), an exceptional book of nonfiction and fables that provides a walking tour of the creative mind.

In Wonderful Investigations, Dan Beachy-Quick broaches “a hazy line, a faulty boundary” between our daily world and one rich with wonder; a magical world in which, through his work as a writer, he participates with a singular combination of critical intelligence and lyricism. Touching on the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Proust, and Plato, among others, Beachy-Quick outlines the problem of duality in modern thought—the separation of the mind and body, word and referent, intelligence and mystery, human and natural—and makes the case for a fuller kind of nature poetry, one that strives to overcome this false separation, and to celebrate the notion that “wonder is the fact that the world has never ceased to be real.

Luminous, generous, and unceasingly curious, Wonderful Investigations is a rich investigation of what it means to think, read, write, and learn.

“Hands-down one of the most beautiful books of the year.” —NPR

From beloved, award-winning poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil comes a debut work of nonfiction—a collection of essays about the natural world, and the way its inhabitants can teach, support, and inspire us.

As a child, Nezhukumatathil called many places home: the grounds of a Kansas mental institution, where her Filipina mother was a doctor; the open skies and tall mountains of Arizona, where she hiked with her Indian father; and the chillier climes of western New York and Ohio. But no matter where she was transplanted—no matter how awkward the fit or forbidding the landscape—she was able to turn to our world’s fierce and funny creatures for guidance.

“What the peacock can do,” she tells us, “is remind you of a home you will run away from and run back to all your life.” The axolotl teaches us to smile, even in the face of unkindness; the touch-me-not plant shows us how to shake off unwanted advances; the narwhal demonstrates how to survive in hostile environments. Even in the strange and the unlovely, Nezhukumatathil finds beauty and kinship. For it is this way with wonder: it requires that we are curious enough to look past the distractions in order to fully appreciate the world’s gifts.

Warm, lyrical, and gorgeously illustrated by Fumi Nakamura, World of Wonders is a book of sustenance and joy.

“Hands-down one of the most beautiful books of the year.” —NPR
A New York Times Bestseller
Barnes & Noble Book of the Year

Beloved author Aimee Nezhukumatathil's celebrated work of nonfiction, now including additional essays and illustrations. 

As a child, Nezhukumatathil called many places home: the grounds of a Kansas mental institution, where her Filipina mother was a doctor; the open skies and tall mountains of Arizona, where she hiked with her Indian father; and the chillier climes of western New York and Ohio. But no matter where she was transplanted—no matter how awkward the fit or forbidding the landscape—she was able to turn to our world’s fierce and funny creatures for guidance.

“What the peacock can do,” she tells us, “is remind you of a home you will run away from and run back to all your life.” The axolotl teaches us to smile, even in the face of unkindness; the touch-me-not plant shows us how to shake off unwanted advances; the narwhal demonstrates how to survive in hostile environments. Even in the strange and the unlovely, Nezhukumatathil finds beauty and kinship. For it is this way with wonder: it requires that we are curious enough to look past the distractions in order to fully appreciate the world’s gifts.

Warm, lyrical, and gorgeously illustrated by Fumi Nakamura, World of Wonders is a book of sustenance and joy.

“Sometimes,” writes Michael Kleber-Diggs writes in this winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, “everything reduces to circles and lines.”

In these poems, Kleber-Diggs names delight in the same breath as loss. Moments suffused with love—teaching his daughter how to drive; watching his grandmother bake a cake; waking beside his beloved to ponder trumpet mechanics—couple with moments of wrenching grief—a father’s life ended by a gun; mourning children draped around their mother’s waist; Freddie Gray’s death in police custody. Even in the refuge-space of dreams, a man calls the police on his Black neighbor.

But Worldly Things refuses to “offer allegiance” to this centuries-old status quo. With uncompromising candor, Kleber-Diggs documents the many ways America systemically fails those who call it home while also calling upon our collective potential for something better. “Let’s create folklore side-by-side,” he urges, asking us to aspire to a form of nurturing defined by tenderness, to a kind of community devoted to mutual prosperity. “All of us want,” after all, “our share of light, and just enough rainfall.”

Sonorous and measured, the poems of Worldly Things offer needed guidance on ways forward—toward radical kindness and a socially responsible poetics.

A Minnesota Book Award Finalist in Poetry

A CLMP Firecracker Award Finalist in Poetry

“Some girls are not made,” torrin a. greathouse writes, “but spring from the dirt.” Guided by a devastatingly precise hand, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound—selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry—challenges a canon that decides what shades of beauty deserve to live in a poem. greathouse celebrates “buckteeth & ulcer.” She odes the pulp of a bedsore. She argues that the vestigial is not devoid of meaning, and in kinetic and vigorous language, she honors bodies the world too often wants dead.

These poems ache, but they do not surrender. They bleed, but they spit the blood in our eyes. Their imagery pulses on the page, fractal and fluid, blooming in a medley of forms: broken essays, haibun born of erasure, a sonnet meant to be read in the mirror. greathouse’s poetry demands more of language and those who wield it. “I’m still learning not to let a stranger speak / me into a funeral.”

Concrete and evocative, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is a testament to persistence, even when the body is not allowed to thrive. greathouse—elegant, vicious, “a one-girl armageddon” draped in crushed velvet—teaches us that fragility is not synonymous with flaw.

With vivid ideas and passion, Deming writes about the importance of nature writing for these peripatetic times.

Descended from the great American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, Alison Deming appropriately begins this philosophical autobiography along the shores of the North Atlantic — on Grand Manan Island, in the Bay of Fundy. Moving on to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and then to Tucson, Arizona, and Paomoho, Hawaii, Deming describes places that are dear to her because their ways are still shaped by terms nature has set, though less and less so.

With vivid ideas and passion, Deming writes about the importance of nature writing for these peripatetic times. Because people's lives are materially less connected to the natural world, they are also spiritually less connected. Through the arts — through the story of the captain whose boat honors the Kwakiutl "Wild Woman of the Woods" or the fisherman who sacrifices his catch to save two whales — people fall again "into harmony with place and each other"; they write the sacred into the real.

Tom Crawford's words paint familiar landscapes—Seattle's coastline, New York's public spaces, rural China, and Western mobile homes—in a new light.

In poems as humorous as they are revelatory, sea birds careen off cliff walls "Then back/to the water to consider/where they went wrong," nudes are spontaneously drawn in urban coffee shops, and the Bhagavad Gita sits on a shelf in a trailer home, holding up deodorant. Crawford’s Eastern spirituality, tempered by working-class pragmatism, transforms these narrative poems into memorable portraits of the everyday.

An exciting new edition/entry to Milkweed's Multiverse series—a visionary collection of poetry advocating for the excited, the rebellious, and the neuroqueer. 

In this momentous debut, Sid Ghosh invites the reader “to be so free that it scares you.” Leveraging gem-like koans, technicolor wordplay, and earth-shaking wit, he creates startling new worlds in only a handful of words. As a nonspeaking autistic writer with Down syndrome who must navigate immense sensorimotor complexity, his short poems are both muscular and agile, displaying a dexterity replete with vertiginous grace: “Spinning I harness / poetry of the Earth. // The Sufi dances / in me to dare me // to scare your loud / soul to ensnare // my fearful mind to / bare some misery / to bear some truth.”

Ghosh writes beyond his years and from a perspective steeped in queer and fractaled sensibilities. As one who is “simply privy to a new road,” he renders neurodiverse thought patterns as truly divine. The poems that result bristle with wisdom, divergence, and the “generosity of deep rivers.” Unprecedented in its genius and composition, this collection of poems is sure to leave readers wide-eyed and breathless.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Big Reads Selection
A 2024 NPR "Books We Love" Selection

"Whoever you are, you will find yourself and your own world in the expansiveness of this collection."
-Margaret Renkl, New York Times

Published in association with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, a singular collection of poems reflecting on our relationship to the natural world by fifty of our most celebrated contemporary writers.

In recent years, our poetic landscape has evolved in profound and exciting ways. So has our planet. Edited and introduced by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limón, this book challenges what we think we know about "nature poetry," illuminating the myriad ways our landscapes-both literal and literary-are changing.

You Are Here features fifty previously unpublished poems from some of the nation's most accomplished poets, including Joy Harjo, Diane Seuss, Rigoberto González, Jericho Brown, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Paul Tran, and more. Each poem engages with its author's local landscape-be it the breathtaking variety of flora in a national park, or a lone tree flowering persistently by a bus stop-offering an intimate model of how we relate to the world around us and a beautifully diverse range of voices from across the United States.

Joyful and provocative, wondrous and urgent, this singular collection of poems offers a lyrical reimagining of what "nature" and "poetry" are today, inviting readers to experience both anew.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

The #1 bestselling and beloved poetry anthology, now in paperback!

“Whoever you are, you will find yourself and your own world in the expansiveness of this collection.”
 –Margaret Renkl, New York Times

“A lovely book to take with you to read at the end of your next hike.”
–Los Angeles Times

Published in association with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, a singular collection of poems reflecting on our relationship to the natural world by fifty of our most celebrated contemporary writers.  

In recent years, our poetic landscape has evolved in profound and exciting ways. So has our planet. Edited and introduced by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limón, this book challenges what we think we know about “nature poetry,” illuminating the myriad ways our landscapes—both literal and literary—are changing.

You Are Here features fifty previously unpublished poems from some of the nation’s most accomplished poets, including Joy Harjo, Diane Seuss, Rigoberto González, Jericho Brown, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Paul Tran, and more. Each poem engages with its author’s local landscape—be it the breathtaking variety of flora in a national park, or a lone tree flowering persistently by a bus stop—offering an intimate model of how we relate to the world around us and a beautifully diverse range of voices from across the United States.

Joyful and provocative, wondrous and urgent, this singular collection of poems offers a lyrical reimagining of what “nature” and “poetry” are today, inviting readers to experience both anew.

Translated from the Arabic and introduced by Fady Joudah, You Can Be the Last Leaf draws on two decades of work to present the transcendent and timely US debut of Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat.

Art. Garlic. Taxis. Sleepy soldiers at checkpoints. The smell of trash on a winter street, before “our wild rosebush, neglected / by the gate, / blooms.” Lovers who don’t return, the possibility that you yourself might not return. Making beds. Cleaning up vomit. Reading recipes. In You Can Be the Last Leaf, these are the ordinary and profound—sometimes tragic, sometimes dreamy, sometimes almost frivolous—moments of life under Israeli occupation.

Here, private and public domains are inseparable. Desire, loss, and violence permeate the walls of the home, the borders of the mind. And yet that mind is full of its own fierce and funny voice, its own preoccupations and strangenesses. “It matters to me,” writes Abu Al-Hayyat, “what you’re thinking now / as you coerce your kids to sleep / in the middle of shelling”: whether it’s coming up with “plans / to solve the world’s problems,” plans that “eliminate longing from stories, remove exhaustion from groans,” or dreaming “of a war / that’s got no war in it,” or proclaiming that “I don’t believe in survival.”

In You Can Be the Last Leaf, Abu Al-Hayyat has created a richly textured portrait of Palestinian interiority—at once wry and romantic, worried and tenacious, and always singing itself.

“Hauntingly fable-like and delightfully idiosyncratic.” —ADA LIMÓN

A woozy logic dominates these poems: a heart can become a buzzing hive of bees, a rooster can trigger a series of bombs, a young man can embrace a city bus as his spirit animal. Yet in this collection—selected by Kevin Prufer as the winner of the 2014 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry—Michael Bazzett slices through his poems with a dangerous sense of humor. “Your humor is deft and cutting / my fingers off one by one.” Once dismembered, Bazzett’s poems can re-member us and piece together the ways in which we once thought we knew ourselves, creating a new, strange sense of self.

A meditation on who we are, who we’ve been, and what we might become, Bazzett’s writing is like a note written in invisible ink: partially what we see on the page, but also the “many dozen doorways that we don’t walk through each day.” You Must Remember This is a consistently slippery, enrapturing collection of poems.

Humans were surrounded by other animals from the beginning of time: they were food, clothes, adversaries, companions, jokes, and gods. And yet, our companions in evolution are leaving the world—both as physical beings and spiritual symbols—and not returning.

In this collection of linked essays, Alison Hawthorne Deming asks, and seeks to answer: what does the disappearance of animals mean for human imagination and existence? Moving from mammoth hunts to dying house cats, she explores profound questions about what it means to be animal. What is inherent in animals that leads us to destroy, and what that leads us toward peace? As human animals, how does art both define us as a species and how does it emerge primarily from our relationship with other species?

The reader emerges with a transformed sense of how the living world around us has defined and continues to define us in a powerful way.

Finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry

Winner of the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize

From one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers, an urgent and essential collection of poems illuminating the visionary presence of Palestinians.

Fady Joudah’s powerful sixth collection of poems opens with, “I am unfinished business,” articulating the ongoing pathos of the Palestinian people. A rendering of Joudah’s survivance, [...] speaks to Palestine’s daily and historic erasure and insists on presence inside and outside the ancestral land. 

Responding to the unspeakable in real time, Joudah offers multiple ways of seeing the world through a Palestinian lens—a world filled with ordinary desires, no matter how grand or tragic the details may be—and asks their reader to be changed by them. The sequences are meditations on a carousel: the past returns as the future is foretold. But “Repetition won’t guarantee wisdom,” Joudah writes, demanding that we resuscitate language “before [our] wisdom is an echo.” These poems of urgency and care sing powerfully through a combination of intimate clarity and great dilations of scale, sending the reader on heartrending spins through echelons of time. […] is a wonder. Joudah reminds us “Wonder belongs to all.”