Milkweed Editions

A New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Readers Pick 

#1 New York Times Bestseller

A Washington Post and Los Angeles Times Bestseller

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on "a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise" (Elizabeth Gilbert).

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

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You Are Here features fifty previously unpublished poems from some of the nation’s most accomplished poets, including Joy Harjo, Diane Seuss, Rigoberto González, Jericho Brown, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Paul Tran,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.

Winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Award

A People Magazine Best Non-Celebrity Memoir of 2024

A People Magazine "Best New Book of the Month"

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction of the Year Selection

A Book Riot “Best Memoirs, Nonfiction Science, and Food Writing of the Last Year”

“I’m in awe of Chris La Tray’s storytelling. Becoming Little Shell creates a multilayered narrative from threads of personal, family, community, tribal, and national histories.”—Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass

Growing up in Montana, Chris La Tray always identified as Indian. Despite the fact that his father fiercely denied any connection, he found Indigenous people alluring, often recalling his grandmother’s consistent mention of their Chippewa heritage.

When La Tray attended his grandfather’s funeral as a young man, he finally found himself surrounded by relatives who obviously were Indigenous. “Who were they?” he wondered, and “Why was I never allowed to know them?” Combining diligent research and compelling conversations with authors, activists, elders, and historians, La Tray embarks on a journey into his family’s past, discovering along the way a larger story of the complicated history of Indigenous communities—as well as the devastating effects of colonialism that continue to ripple through surviving generations. And as he comes to embrace his full identity, he eventually seeks enrollment with the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians, joining their 158-year-long struggle for federal recognition. 

Both personal and historical, Becoming Little Shell is a testament to the power of storytelling, to family and legacy, and to finding home. Infused with candor, heart, wisdom, and an abiding love for a place and a people, Chris La Tray’s remarkable journey is both revelatory and redemptive.

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.

A polyphonic new entry in Multiverse—a literary series written and curated by the neurodivergent—JJJJJerome Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies beautifully extends the vision of his debut book and album, The Clearing, a “lyrical celebration of and inquiry into the intersections of blackness, music, and disabled speech” (Claudia Rankine).

Aster of Ceremonies asks what rites we need now and how poetry, astir in the asters, can help them along. What is the relationship between fleeing and feeling? How can the voices of those who came before—and the stutters that leaven those voices—carry into our present moment, mingling with our own? When Ellis writes, “Bring me the stolen will / Bring me the stolen well,” his voice is a conduit, his “me” is many. Through the grateful invocations of ancestors—Hannah, Mariah, Kit, Jan, and others—and their songs, he rewrites history, creating a world that blooms backward, reimagining what it means for Black and disabled people to have taken, and to continue to take, their freedom. 

By weaving a chorus of voices past and present, Ellis counters the attack of “all masters of all vessels” and replaces it with a family of flowers. He models how—as with his brilliant transduction of escaped slave advertisements—we might proclaim lost ownership over literature and history. “Bring me to the well,” he chants, implores, channels. “Bring me to me.” In this bringing, in this singing, he proclaims our collective belonging to shared worlds where we can gather and heal.

The Aster of Ceremonies audiobook read and performed by JJJJJerome Ellis is available everywhere you listen to audiobooks. 

Winner of the Southern Book Prize
Winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

From the author of the bestselling #ReadWithJenna/TODAY Show book club pick Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

For the past four years, Margaret Renkl’s columns have offered readers of The New York Times a weekly dose of natural beauty, human decency, and persistent hope from her home in Nashville. Now more than sixty of those pieces have been brought together in this sparkling new collection.

“People have often asked me how it feels to be the ‘voice of the South,’” writes Renkl in her introduction. “But I’m not the voice of the South, and no one else is, either.” There are many Souths—red and blue, rural and urban, mountain and coast, Black and white and brown—and no one writer could possibly represent all of them. In Graceland, At Last, Renkl writes instead from her own experience about the complexities of her homeland, demonstrating along the way how much more there is to this tangled region than many people understand.

In a patchwork quilt of personal and reported essays, Renkl also highlights some other voices of the South, people who are fighting for a better future for the region. A group of teenagers who organized a youth march for Black Lives Matter. An urban shepherd whose sheep remove invasive vegetation. Church parishioners sheltering the homeless. Throughout, readers will find the generosity of spirit and deep attention to the world, human and nonhuman, that keep readers returning to her columns each Monday morning.

From a writer who “makes one of all the world’s beings” (NPR), Graceland, At Last is a book full of gifts for Southerners and non-Southerners alike.

From New York Times contributing opinion writer Margaret Renkl comes an unusual, captivating portrait of a family—and of the cycles of joy and grief that inscribe human lives within the natural world.

Growing up in Alabama, Renkl was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and red-dirt roads, and a fiercely loved daughter. Here, in brief essays, she traces a tender and honest portrait of her complicated parents—her exuberant, creative mother; her steady, supportive father—and of the bittersweet moments that accompany a child’s transition to caregiver.

And here, braided into the overall narrative, Renkl offers observations on the world surrounding her suburban Nashville home. Ringing with rapture and heartache, these essays convey the dignity of bluebirds and rat snakes, monarch butterflies and native bees. As these two threads haunt and harmonize with each other, Renkl suggests that there is astonishment to be found in common things: in what seems ordinary, in what we all share. For in both worlds—the natural one and our own—“the shadow side of love is always loss, and grief is only love’s own twin.”

Gorgeously illustrated by the author’s brother, Billy Renkl, Late Migrations is an assured and memorable debut.

Winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, a tender, yearning collection of poems that pieces together identity with the different shapes absence can take. 

“Blurry eyes mean a longing for home,” writes Bo Hee Moon in her prize-winning collection, “but we’re unsure what home means.” A South Korean adoptee raised in the United States, the poet reaches for language to confront the complex, myriad emotions that accompany understanding identity and belonging after transnational, cross-cultural adoption. 

Through verse both innocent and wise, the speaker searches for the memory of a birth mother who passed before they could reunite, aided only by “my birth chart” and “this tiny, / careful body you gave me.” To reimagine reunion, she creates a reality in which she can look into the “fragile depth” of her birth mother’s eyes, envision her parents meeting among spring azaleas and rice paddies, and gently cleanse her mother’s dying body. Transcending boundaries between generations, between life and death, she learns how to transform, how to forge an identity of her own, declaring, “I am changing, completely, / behind a rice paper door.” 

With poems that serve as our speaker’s “loyal companion // in the burnt / pine and dawn,” Birthstones in the Province of Mercy illuminates the language that nourishes the delicate and vital connection between an adoptee and her origins. 

Copper Nickel is the national literary journal housed at the University of Colorado Denver. It is edited by poet, editor, and translator Wayne Miller (author of six collections, including The End of Childhood and We the Jury, coeditor of Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century, and co-translator of Moikom Zeqo’s Zodiac) and co-editor Joanna Luloff (author of Remind Me Again What Happened and The Beach at Galle Road)—along with poetry editors Brian Barker (author of Vanishing Acts, The Black Ocean, and The Animal Gospels) and Nicky Beer (author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes, The Octopus Game, and The Diminishing House), and fiction editors Teague Bohlen (author of The Pull of the Earth), Christopher Merkner (author of The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic), and Emily Wortman-Wunder (author of Not a Thing to Comfort You).

Since the journal’s relaunch in 2015, work published in Copper Nickel has been regularly selected for inclusion in Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, Best Small Fictions, Best Literary Translations, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and has often been listed as “notable” in the Best American Essays. According to Clifford Garstang’s 2024 literary journal rankings, Copper Nickel is ranked number 15 for poetry and number 35 for fiction, out of more than 700 regularly publishing literary journals.

Contributors to Copper Nickel have received numerous honors for their work, including the Nobel Prize; the National Book Critics Circle Award; the Pulitzer Prize; the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; the Laughlin Award; the American, California, Colorado, Minnesota, and Washington State Book Awards; the Georg Büchner Prize; the Prix Max Jacob; the Griffin Poetry Prize; the Lenore Marshall Prize; the T. S. Eliot and Forward Prizes; the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award; the Lambda Literary Award; as well as fellowships from the NEA and the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill, Witter Bynner, Soros, Rona Jaffee, Bush, and Jerome Foundations. 

Copper Nickel is published twice a year, on March 15 and October 15, and is distributed nationally to bookstores and other outlets by Publishers Group West (PGW) and Accelerate 360. 

Issue 40 Includes:

• Translation Folios featuring contemporary Ukrainian poet Yuri Andrukhovych, translated by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin; modernist Russian poet Andrey Platonov, translated by George Kovalenko; and contemporary Chinese fiction writer Yang Hao, translated by Michael Day.

• New Poetry by PEN Open Book Martins Award winner Timothy Liu, William Carlos Williams Award winner G. C. Waldrep, Whiting Award winner Matt Donovan, Isabella Gardner Award winner Keetje Kuipers, Lannan Literary Fellow Natalie Scenters-Zapico, Kate Tufts Award winner Janice N. Harrington, Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize winner Lee Sharkey, NEA Fellows John Isles and Orlando Ricardo Menes, Cave Canem Fellow Miles E. Johnson, National Poetry Series winners Justin Boening and Rosalie Moffett, Best American Poetry contributor Brionne Janae, Poets Out Loud Prize winner Sara Michas-Martin, and many others.

• New Fiction by Rome Prize winner Matthew Neill Null, NEA Fellow Alyson Hagy, O. Henry and Pushcart contributor Ayşe Papatya Bucak, and relative newcomers Melissa Bowers and Ash Kaul.

• New Essays by Kingsley Tufts Award winner Marianne Boruch and NEA Fellow Vedran Husić.

• Cover Art by Venezuelan-born, Nebraska-based artist Francisco Souto.

Contributor Locations

Contributors to issue 40 come from all over the country and the world. 

———

U.S. cities/regions where contributors and staff are concentrated include (organized alphabetically by state):

San Francisco Bay Area, CA (contributors Melissa Bowers, John Isles, Ostap Kin, Pattabi Seshadri, and Todd Turnidge; contributing editor Randall Mann)

Los Angeles, CA (contributor James Ciano; contributing editors Victoria Chang, Piotr Florczyk, Amaud Jamaul Johnson, and Chris Santiago)

Denver, CO (home of Copper Nickel and the Copper Nickel staff)

Tampa, FL (contributors Vedran Husić and Natalie Scenters-Zapico)

Amherst, MA (contributors Matt Donovan and John Hennessy)

Boston/Cambridge, MA (contributing editors Martha Collins and Frederick Reiken)

Saint Louis, MO (contributor Chad Parmenter, contributing editor Niki Herd)

Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN (home of Milkweed Editions; contributing editor V. V. Ganeshananthan)

Saint Louis, MO (contributor Mary Jo Bang; contributing editor Niki Herd)

Missoula, MT (contributor Keetje Kuipers, contributing editor Sean Hill)

New York, NY (contributors David Hopson, Brionne Janae, and George Kovalenko)

Philadelphia, PA (contributor Justin Boening, contributing editor Adrienne Perry)

Pittsburgh, PA (contributor Miles E. Johnson, contributing editors Joy Katz and Kevin Haworth)

———

U.S. cities/regions with individual contributors (organized alphabetically by state):

Carmel, CA (contributor Sara Michas-Martin)

Joshua Tree, CA (contributor Louise Mathias)

San Diego, CA (contributor Michael Day)

Washington, DC (contributing editor David Keplinger)

Boca Raton, FL (contributor Ayşe Papatya Bucak)

Boise, ID (contributing editor Emily Ruskovich)

Champaign, IL (contributor Janice N. Harrington)

Chicago, IL (contributing editor Robert Archambeau)

Evansville, IN (contributor Rosalie Moffett)

South Bend, IN (contributor Orlando Ricardo Menes)

West Lafayette, IN (contributor Marianne Boruch)

Lexington, KY (contributing editor Ada Limón)

Windham, ME (contributor Kimberly Ann Priest)

Middleville, MI (contributor Kathleen McGookey)

Jefferson City, MO (contributor Peter Monacell)

Kansas City, MO (contributor Luisa Muradyan)

Graham, NC (contributor Ryan Clark)

Greensboro, NC (contributing editor Emilia Phillips)

Newark, NJ (contributor Ashley Bockholdt)

Princeton, NJ (contributing editor James Richardson)

Canton, NY (contributing editor Pedro Ponce)

Endwell, NY (contributor Dante Di Stefano)

New Paltz, NY (contributor Timothy Liu)

Easton, PA (contributor Owen McLeod)

Lewisburg, PA (contributor G. C .Waldrep)

Shamokin Dam, PA (contributor Matthew Neill Null)

Tulsa, OK (contributing editor Kavey Bassiri)

Memphis, TN (contributor Maria Zoccola)

Dallas, TX (contributing editor Tarfia Faizullah)

Springville, UT (contributor Lance Larsen)

Madison, WI (contributor Aurora Shimshak)

Laramie, WY (contributor Alyson Hagy)

Blacksburg, VA (contributing editor Janine Joseph)

———

International contributors live in:

Navi Mumbai, India (contributor Ash Kaul)

Belfast, Northern Ireland (contributor Milena Williamson)

Berlin, Germany (contributing editor Alexander Lumans)

Ivano-Frankvsk, Ukraine (contributor Yuri Andrukhovych)

Dublin, Ireland (contributor Yang Hao)

“A restless collection of incredible breadth, whose ability to meld applied science, faith, history, racial myth, and personal archive gives us poems whose power is unmistakable. A game-changing book.”—Rosalie Moffett, judge of the 2024 National Poetry Series

Radiant with a tenderness that is only achieved through close attention, these poems offer witnessing and formalistic exploration as well as a unique cosmology that is made ever more expansive by blurred lines between the instructional and the improvisational. For Keith Wilson, no image, thought, stanza, or diagram is sufficient in the practice of illumination, so he combines them. The Uncanny Valley diagram is repurposed to imagine a future Emmett Till never saw; visual instructions for line dancing stand in tension with the memory of Wilson’s grandfather picking cotton; prayer is input as equation; a poem gerrymanders a sentence diagram. In these and other gestures, Wilson expands the possibility of what poetry can hold.

Thematically expansive and materially ambidextrous, Games for Children demonstrates how play is one of the highest forms of freedom, and in reclaiming it, our most tender truths are exposed.

“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.

An essential collection spanning nearly twenty years of emphatic, fearlessly original poetry from one of America’s most celebrated living writers.

Drawing from six previously published books—including widely acclaimed collections The Hurting Kind, The Carrying, and Bright Dead Things—as well as vibrant new work,  Startlement exalts the mysterious. With a tender curiosity, Limón wades into potent unknowns—the strangeness of our brief human lives, the ever-changing nature of the universe—and emerges each time with new revelations about our place in the world.

Both a lush overview of her work and a powerful narrative of a poet’s life, this curation embodies Limón’s capacity for “deep attention,” her “power to open us up to the wonder and awe that the world still inspires” (The New York Times). From the chaos of youthful desire, to the waxing of love and loss, to the precarity of our environment, to the stars and beyond, Limón’s poetry bears witness to the arc of all we know with patient lyricism and humble wonder.

“A poet of ecstatic revelation” (Tracy K. Smith), Limón encourages us to meet our shared futures with open and hungry hearts, assuring “What we are becoming, we are / becoming together.”

A remarkable debut that explores the imperfect ways we care for one another, and how we seek repair when care fails.

“What’s our obligation to each other?” asks Jennifer Eli Bowen in this propulsive exploration of community, solitude, and love. Drawing on her experiences as a mother, daughter, and founder of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, the country’s largest and most enduring prison-based literary organization, she examines the wild spectrum of shapes that care can take. She investigates the role of community across the world and in her own neighborhood, driven by a curiosity to uncover what might be gleaned from various vanishments in her own life: the shadow of her father, disappeared backyard chickens, a Moleskine notebook that passes in and out of her Little Free Library.

Tracing both connection and its lack, Eli Bowen uncovers what happens when it’s missing, how we find it, and how it heals individuals, communities, and systems—from the incarcerated caretakers of newborn foals in Norway to the time-bending drama of watching children grow into adults. And through this winding quest to understand love, she moves readers out of their complacency not only about the state of American incarceration, but about what we owe ourselves and society.

Unflinching, vulnerable, and surprisingly funny, The Book of Kin encourages us not to abandon each other, reminding us that “harm is shared, and healing is too.

“An extraordinary, necessary book from a brilliant writer. A new song of the earth.”—Robert Macfarlane

From an exciting new voice in international literature, a profoundly moving memoir that explores the Black experience in the natural world and the transformative power of plants.

Jason Allen-Paisant grew up in the May Day Mountains of Jamaica. The cycles of his boyhood revolved around tending the plots of cabbage, tomatoes, and yams dotting the clay hillsides; playing beneath the cavernous roots of cotton trees; and climbing trunks of the fruit trees that fed him and his grandmother. But as a student of the literature of colonial England, in which the landscape of heather and moors has long been thought of as ideal, these years of subsistence and community evoked more shame than pride, and a language for the natural world that surrounded him remained elusive.

Years after leaving the island to attend university in England, and eventually achieving a position as a lecturer in Leeds, he finds himself “alienated from land, from planting, from watching things grow.” Walking among the trees in Yorkshire, he wonders how his own body will be perceived and can’t help but think of the epidemic of anti-Black violence across the Western world. He returns to Jamaica and the intimate archives of knowledge in his late grandmother’s grung, determined to reclaim his cultural inheritance, and ultimately to rediscover a “second life of seeing,” based on old ways of knowing.

“A beautiful and urgent work of productive experimentation and philosophical reckoning” (Kwame Dawes), The Possibility of Tenderness is a book for our time.

From the celebrated author of Philomath, an astonishingly inventive collection of poems illuminating human, planetary, and personal survival.

Traversing historical, terrestrial, and discursive limits, Devon Walker-Figueroa brings a chorus of perspectives, eras, idioms, and ideals into novel if not turbulent dialogue. In this dazzling second collection, bursting with detailed case studies, obscure natural phenomena, and flagrant apocrypha, these poems calculate the debilitating and contorting costs of survival. “You find your family, / your whole phyla & future, buried / in some encyclopedia & glean / how small the risk of eternity,” she imagines, addressing the consciousness of a “Lazarus species”—creatures thought vanished, even while they live.

Here, classical poetic forms meet postmodern notations and aerospace architecture meets Babylonian hymns, all of them wrestling with the aberrant existence we yield to in life, and wield against other lives. We read into the worlds of a tormented Lawrence of Arabia, our special ancestor Australopithecus, Tesla’s space dummy Starman, and other brilliantly posed figures and sagas in indelible spaces like “The Euthanasia Coaster,” a “Desert Theater,” and “Paradise Lust.” 

Conceptually driven and blooming with a lyricism at once tender and razor-sharp, Lazarus Species knows no bounds in the exploration of an evolutionary, archeological, and interstellar vision.

A beautifully rendered debut memoir of family, legacy, conservation, the natural world—and those who inhabit it.

As a civil engineer, Sangamithra Iyer knows about resilience from studying soils and water. As an animal rights activist, she advocates for a revolution in how we value and relate to other species. And as the child of immigrants from India, she searches for submerged histories. 

Animated by a series of questions—How do we disentangle ourselves from systems of harm? Is it possible to grasp the scale of planetary sorrow and emerge with truth and love as our guides, rather than despair? What is the relationship between individual action and systemic change?—this memoir takes the form of three meandering rivers, each written as a letter. Addressing the first of them to her grandfather, Iyer assembles the story of a man who embraced Gandhi’s philosophy and went to work developing wells in Tamil Nadu. In a second letter, addressed to her father, she explores their shared interest in cultivating compassion for all beings. And then in a final letter, addressed to readers, she braids these explorations of her familial past with her own experiences as a woman of color and citizen of the world, always seeking ways to move beyond resignation and restore flow.  

A lyrical story of lineages and an urgently needed reckoning with the ways bodies are both controlled and liberated, Governing Bodies is a timeless work with profoundly timely relevance.

A People Magazine "Best New Book of the Month"

Winner of the 2025 Pacific Northwest Book Award

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction of the Year Selection

A Book Riot "Best Memoirs, Nonfiction Science, and Food Writing of the Last Year"

“I’m in awe of Chris La Tray’s storytelling. Becoming Little Shell creates a multilayered narrative from threads of personal, family, community, tribal, and national histories.”—Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass

Growing up in Montana, Chris La Tray always identified as Indian. Despite the fact that his father fiercely denied any connection, he found Indigenous people alluring, often recalling his grandmother’s consistent mention of their Chippewa heritage.

When La Tray attended his grandfather’s funeral as a young man, he finally found himself surrounded by relatives who obviously were Indigenous. “Who were they?” he wondered, and “Why was I never allowed to know them?” Combining diligent research and compelling conversations with authors, activists, elders, and historians, La Tray embarks on a journey into his family’s past, discovering along the way a larger story of the complicated history of Indigenous communities—as well as the devastating effects of colonialism that continue to ripple through surviving generations. And as he comes to embrace his full identity, he eventually seeks enrollment with the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians, joining their 158-year-long struggle for federal recognition. 

Both personal and historical, Becoming Little Shell is a testament to the power of storytelling, to family and legacy, and to finding home. Infused with candor, heart, wisdom, and an abiding love for a place and a people, Chris La Tray’s remarkable journey is both revelatory and redemptive.

In the last years of his life, Henry David Thoreau created something new. Part blueprint for a major new work, part scientific chart, and part re-envisioning of the way we experience the passage of time, Thoreau’s Kalendar was more a tool than a text. Comprised of six multipage charts of “general phenomena,” the Kalendar was an instrument for recording not just natural and weather-related phenomena, but also the hidden relations among them—between the skies of one June and the skies of past and future Junes—relations we often feel but can’t quite hold, rooted as we typically are in our own brief moment of linear time. 

Combining reproductions of Thoreau’s hand-drawn charts with transcriptions of the Kalendar’s text and essays by acclaimed poet and scholar Kristen Case, this gorgeously crafted volume illuminates the final project of one of America’s most treasured writers and naturalists and offers a timeless, transformative vision of how to live harmoniously with the living world around us.  

“Helen Whybrow is a to-the-bone writer, and this is a to-the-bone book—beautiful, real, full of life.”—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

“Sheep have helped me become a good shepherd, not just to them, but to a place that is my sustenance and joy as well as my unending labor and worry."

In the heart of Vermont’s Green Mountains, Helen Whybrow and her partner are presented with the opportunity to steward a two-hundred-acre conserved farm. Whybrow knows that “belonging more than anything requires participation” and radically intertwines her life with the land. Six months after purchasing Knoll Farm, they unload a flock of Icelandic sheep onto the field and Whybrow becomes a shepherd entering into “nature’s constant cycle of life into death into life” and all its unexpected lessons. 

The challenging and profoundly rewarding work unfolds for Whybrow in the everyday rituals of farmsteading and caring for her family—birthing lambs in the late winter, harvesting blueberries in summer, fending off coyotes and foxes, seasonal shearing—while instilling the lessons of the land in her daughter and caring for her mother. As life at Knoll Farm endures years both abundant and lean, she learns that true stewardship is about accepting change and adapting. She embraces a transcendent rhythm of blood and bone, milk and muck.

At once inspiring and brave, deeply felt and gorgeously written, The Salt Stones is a loving look at the world through a shepherd’s interconnected ethos.

“The Way Around is the kind of book my soul perpetually yearns for. It reshaped how I see the world.”—Robert Moor, author of On Trails: An Exploration

For readers of Robert Macfarlane, Rebecca Solnit, and Robert Moor, a multidimensional exploration of ecology, revolution, and homecoming. Growing up in northern California, in a family of high-achieving athletes, Nicholas Triolo was imbued with a particularly acute form of our intensely goal-oriented culture. “Do the reps,” he internalized. “Commit to the work. Grind for your dreams.” Shortly after graduating from college, he embarked on a solo circumnavigation of the globe. And then after returning to the States, he threw himself into ultrarunning, all to combat a deepening discontent.

While traveling around the world, it was in Kathmandu that Triolo first encountered kora, a form of moving prayer in which pilgrims walk in circles around a sacred site or object—a kind of “ritualized remembering” birthed by place. Unable to shake this initial encounter with circumambulation, he sets out here on three such extended walks. First, he completes the sacred thirty-two-mile revolution around Tibet’s Mount Kailash, in search of a cultural counter to Western linearity. Then, following his mother’s diagnosis with breast cancer, he returns home to California and takes part in an annual circuit of Mount Tamalpais, tracing a route made famous by Beat poets Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Allen Ginsberg. And then finally, he meets up with a quirky hydrogeologist in Butte, Montana, and joins his walk around the Berkeley Pit Complex, the largest Superfund site in the country.

At once uncommonly humble and thrillingly transcendent, blurring the boundaries of inner and outer landscapes, The Way Around models what it means to experience a true revolution of heart and home—for the flourishing of all.

“[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.

“A truly fascinating and heartwarming travelogue that beautifully points us in bold directions.”—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders

One woman’s cross-country journey to explore the hold family history has on our lives, and the power of new stories to shape what lies ahead.

In her mid-thirties and happily single, Karen Babine hitches up her tiny Scamp camper and sets out with her two unenthusiastic cats, Galway and Maeve, on a journey from her home in Minnesota to Nova Scotia to explore the place where her French-Acadian ancestors settled in North America some four centuries ago.

As the miles roll by, she wonders: “Why do we carry this need to belong to an established history? What happens when that can’t—or shouldn’t—happen?” The road reveals more questions than answers about her history, identity, and belonging, about the responsibilities of stories and silence, about her life choices as a solo woman, and what it means to be driven by both a strong sense of kinship to a very close-knit family on one hand and a deep desire for independence on the other.

Capturing the joy, freedom, and powerful pull of the open road, The Allure of Elsewhere is about the stories we’re told, the stories we tell, and the way those stories make us who we are, often in surprising ways. Intimate, curious, and candid, written with wry wit and warmth, this is a courageous and inspiring memoir.

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.

A propulsive, layered examination of the conflict between the course of nature and human legacies of resistance and control.

Floods, geoengineering, climate crisis. Her first year in Margaretville, New York, Jennifer Kabat wakes to a rain-swollen stream and her basement flooding. As she delves into the region’s fraught environmental history, it becomes clear that this is far from the first—and hardly the worst—disaster in the region. Tracing connections across time, she uncovers Cold War weather experiments, betrayals of the Mohawk Nation, and an unlikely cast of characters, including Kurt Vonnegut’s older brother, Bernard—all reflected through grief brought on by her father’s recent passing. 

Inquisitive and experimental, Nightshining uses place as a palimpsest of history. With lyrical incision, Kabat mirrors her own life experience and the essence of being human—the cosmos thrumming in our bodies, connecting readers to the land around us and time before us.

"These are poems—generative, alert, and complex—that make good on the promise of the book's smart and fitting title.” —Natalie Shapero, author of Popular Longing

A brilliant and lithe collection of poems making space for the resolve and hope of motherhood amid consumerist dreams and nightmares.

Consumerism—its privations and raptures—seeps into all aspects of contemporary life. “Who knows me / as the search bar does, which holds / sacred its grasp of me / as a creature of habit?” probes Rosalie Moffett, reckoning with algorithms, with marketing and capital. But Making a Living isn’t just about the trappings of materialism—it’s also about the fraught trials of trying to bring forth life in a double-dealing America where all sources are suspect.

Shrewdly balancing the likes of Scrooge McDuck and HGTV, ancient Roman haruspicy and the latest pregnancy technologies, this collection arcs ultimately toward reinhabiting the present, refusing to look away—on seeing as a method of prayer and a power against capitalism’s threats to love, motherhood, reverence, and nature. Vigilant and profane, gentle and generous, full of desire and cunning, Moffett’s poetry is a singular entry in our conversations around enduring modern life and daring to make new life in the process.

A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2025

A Kirkus Starred Review

“A cunning writer with masterful timing and an outrageous sense of humor.”—Gary Shteyngart

An irreverent, darkly comic novel dissecting the misjudgments, hypocrisies, and occasional good motives that drive our politics and our journalism, as well as our most intimate personal relations. 

At his desk one day, prominent Washington commentator Adam Zweig receives a text message. “Btw want to give you a heads-up abt some breaking news,” it reads. “Call soonest.” These are the early rumblings of an eventual media storm generated by small-town reporter Valerie Iovine, who has gone public with her account of sexual harassment at the hands of esteemed editor and liberal icon Max Lieberthol. Twenty years have passed since the incident, and though Adam wasn’t directly involved, he quickly finds himself implicated and entangled, his career under imminent threat.

Adam has never forgotten his history with Valerie: as former colleagues, their workplace collaboration had gradually tipped into a mutual romantic attraction. Or so he believed. Confronted by the claims against his former boss and a growing awareness of rampant sexism in his industry, Adam, who had always thought of himself as progressive, is forced to challenge his own assumptions over the years. What once seemed incidental becomes sinister; what once seemed like a blundering encounter helped derail a young woman’s promising career.

Sly and ironic, A Hole in the Story explores one imperfect man’s dilemmas as he tries to keep his feet in a shifting moral landscape. 

"Small Wars Manual is a masterpiece, one of those books I read and know at once I’ll be coming back to the rest of my life.”—Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

From award-winning poet Chris Santiago, a far-reaching collection of erasures and original poems examining the long shadow of American militarism and imperialism.

Stemming in part from a disturbingly mundane military document of the same name, Small Wars Manual is a how-to for imperialism that critically dismantles itself with each passing line, “a pidgin // containing elements // of animus and // insubordination.” In its wake, the very boundaries of oppression and resistance, art and justice, and power and truth are exploded.

Highly conceptual yet gut-wrenching, this meticulous and visionary masterpiece of erasure poetry and other forms sinks into the cold mechanics of American warfare in the Philippines and Vietnam to reveal a brutal rhetoric. In more autobiographical sections, Chris Santiago’s own Filipino immigrant background reveals hard-lived experiences, where “stars can guide // either bayonets // or refugees” and “even small wars waged // on the living room floor” cause trepidation and harm.

This righteous collection redeems the vulnerable from the aggressors—empire, army, their systems and tools—and transforms everything in the process. In the hands of Santiago, the deconstructive becomes the eviscerating, condemning all wars that upend countries and mark generations. Here are shining poems that make shelter of chaos, by one of the most skillful and intrepid poets writing today.

"These poems achieve the beautiful, uncanny fusing that Miller defines as poetry itself.”—Rick Barot, author of Moving the Bones

A tender and provocative collection of poems interrogating the troubles and wonders of both childhood and parenthood against the backdrop of global violence.

From accomplished poet Wayne Miller comes a collection examining how an individual’s story both hews to and defies larger socio-political narratives and the sweep of history. A cubist making World War I camouflage, a forlorn panel on the ethics of violence in literature, an obsessive litany of “late capitalist” activities, a military drone pilot driving home after work—here, the awkward, the sweet, and the disturbing often merge. And underlying it all is Miller’s own domestic life with two children, who highlight the hopeful and ingenious aspects of childhood, which is “not // as I had thought / the thicket of light back at the entrance // but the wind still blowing / invisibly toward me / through it.” 

The End of Childhood, Miller’s sixth collection of poems, is his most intimate, juxtaposing his own fraught youth with that of his children amid insurrection and pandemic, vacation and vocation, art and war. This piercing book spares nothing as it searches for a measure of personal benevolence and truth in today’s turbulent, brutalizing world—which it confronts through a singularly candid and lyrical voice.

A definitive collection of Henry David Thoreau’s major essays, annotated and introduced by Lewis Hyde.

Diverging from the long-standing custom of separating Thoreau’s politics from his interest in nature, renowned author Lewis Hyde brings together essays that highlight the ways in which these two strands of thought were intertwined. Here, natural history begins not with fish and birds, but with a dismissal of the political world, and condemnation of slavery concludes with a meditation on the water lilies blooming on the Concord River.

This definitive edition includes Thoreau’s most famous essays, “Civil Disobedience” and “Walking,” along with lesser-known masterpieces such as “Wild Apples,” “The Last Days of John Brown,” and an account of Thoreau’s 1846 journey into the Maine wilderness to climb Mount Katahdin—an essay that ends on a unique note of sublimity and terror in the face of raw nature. While Thoreau’s ideal reader was expected to be politically engaged in current affairs and well versed in Greek, Latin, poetry, and travel narrative, Hyde’s inviting annotations clarify many of Thoreau’s references and recreate the contemporary context of the day, when the nation’s westward expansion was bringing to a head the racial tensions that would result in the Civil War.

Hyde deems Thoreau’s writing prophetic because “the prophet speaks of things that will be true in the future because they are true in all time.” Thoreau’s revelatory writing coupled with the luminous insights from Hyde—“one of our country’s greatest public thinkers” (Lawrence Weschler)—make The Essays of Henry David Thoreau essential reading at a moment in our nation’s history when his subversiveness, foresight, and lyricism are badly needed.

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 Jake Adam York Prize, this collection of poems seeks answers about how to live meaningfully in a world saturated by late capitalism.

“The question isn’t / what exists,” writes Sarah V. Schweig in her engrossing and prize-winning collection, “The question is what doesn’t / die with us?” Positioned from within the morass of modern-day living, The Ocean in the Next Room searches for the hard, abiding particles of truth buried beneath our frenzied consumer culture. Stillness. Sunsets. The circadian rhythm of trees. These poems guide us to look past branding, content-creation, and relentless jargon to find meaning in those layers of the world that operate without human intervention.

In verse that is at once inventive and innately familiar, Schweig unpacks the urge to make art, life, and connections even at the risk of becoming further entangled in the Anthropocene. Profound and clear-sighted, this collection urges us to lift our gazes from our screens and really look at the world around us. If we measure our attentions and sharpen our intentions, if we “try again to write / the true things,” we might spy something real on the horizon.

A ground-breaking collection of poems exploring disability, syntax, and rhythm from a Brooklyn-based Senegalese American writer with cerebral palsy. 

Latif Askia Ba—an acclaimed poet with Choreic Cerebral Palsy—honors all the things that arise from our unique choreographies. Meeting each reader with corporeal generosity, these poems create space to practice a radical reclamation of movement and the body. Together. In dialogue. In disability. At the bodega, in the examination room, on the move. “This way. My body looks like a dancing tattoo.” Here, the drum of the body punctuates thought in unexpected and invigorating time signatures.

These poems are percussive and syncopated, utilizing a polylingual braid of French, Spanish, Jamaican, Fulani, and Wolof, reminding the Anglophone reader: “I am not here to accommodate you.” Because these poems are not so much for you as they are with you, an accompaniment rather than an accommodation, something to be rather than something to own.

With startling nuance, The Choreic Period encourages us to “relinquish the things that we have. And mark the thing that we do,” all to see and sing the vital “thing that we be.”

“Raw, visionary, lucid, and mystical, Cacophony of Bone speaks of the connection between all things, and the magic that can be found in everyday life.”—Katherine May, bestselling author of Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

Two days after the winter solstice, Kerri ní Dochartaigh and her partner moved to a remote cottage in the heart of Ireland. They were looking for a home, somewhere to settle into a stable life. Then the pandemic arrived, and their secluded abode became a place of enforced isolation. What was meant to be the beginning of an enriching new chapter was instead marked by uncertainty and fear. The seasons still passed, the swallows returned, the rhythms of the natural world went on, but in many ways, everything was forever changed. Mapping the circle of a year—a journey from one place to another, field notes of a life—Kerri tells the story of a changed life in a changed world. And for Kerri there would be one more change: a baby, longed for but utterly, beautifully unexpected.

Intensely lyrical and deeply moving, Cacophony of Bone is an ode to a year, a place, the natural world, and most of all to a love that transformed a life. Guided by a voice that is utterly singular, this book is “raw, visionary, lucid, and mystical” (Katherine May), a meditation on home, the deepening of family, and the connections that sustain us.

“If you loved The Covenant of Water you will devour this sweeping debut. . . A moving portrait of a family and a nation divided.” —Oprah Daily, "Most Anticipated Books of 2025"

“House of Caravans is a marvel of a novel.”—Ha Jin, author of Waiting: A Novel

A sweeping and richly evocative debut novel of a family bound by memory and legacy, love and loss, and a homeland forever changed.

Lahore, British India. 1943. As resentment of colonial rule grows, so do acts of rebellion. Seduced by idealistic visions, at seventeen Chhote Nanu is imprisoned for planting a bomb on behalf of the resistance, leaving his brother Barre to fight for his freedom. But Chhote is consumed not by thoughts of family and liberation, but by the beautiful half-English woman he met before his arrest. Who was she really, and who was the child with her? 

Kanpur, India. 2002. Karan Khati is studying in the States when his younger sister, Ila, informs him that their grandfather Barre Nanu has died, and asks that he return home. When he arrives, he finds their estranged mother at odds with their embittered granduncle, Chhote. As hard truths and harmful legacies of familial and religious prejudice resurface, an already-fractured family must learn to heal after being driven apart by years of contentious secrets and unresolved heartache.  

Spanning generations, Shilpi Suneja’s House of Caravans is a masterfully told and moving portrayal of a family and a nation divided by the lasting consequences of colonialism.

“Marginlands is a tour de force, a magnificent first book about India’s marginalized landscapes and inhabitants, written with compassion, compressed elegance of observation, and urgent political force.”—Robert Macfarlane

As a child growing up in Mumbai, Arati Kumar-Rao’s parents instilled in her an abiding love for the natural world and a passion for storytelling. Years later, adrift in a corporate job and concerned by the unbridled development of her country, she asked herself, “When will you stop doing what you can do and start doing what you really want to do?”

Animated by an instinctive sense that our fate is bound to that of the earth and the more-than-human world, Kumar-Rao sets out on a journey across India, listening along the way to stories the land and its people share with her. In the Thar Desert, often reduced to the value of extractable commodities, she learns about ancient methods of harvesting rainwater from shepherds with deep ancestral memories. In the delta formed by the confluence of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna Rivers at the Bay of Bengal, she walks ancient shorelines and mangrove forests with a marine biologist, exploring tidepools and learning of the extent to which this astonishingly diverse ecology is increasingly endangered by commercial trawlers and overfishing. And on India’s northernmost plateau, surrounded by the Himalaya and home to snow leopards, ibex, and numerous endangered species of eagles and owls, she finds glaciers disappearing at an alarming rate and meets with inhabitants who play little role in creating climate change but now bear the brunt of it.

Richly illustrated with the author’s photographs and drawings, Marginlands is a vibrant and compelling account of the changes reshaping India today. Engaging and urgent, infused with wonder and profound empathy, this is a work of love and hope, inspiring readers across the world to preserve and protect the world around us.

“A masterpiece of travel and topographical writing, and an incomparable and enthralling meditation on times past.”—John Banville

“He knows this world as no one else does, and writes about it with awe and love, but also with measured grace, an artist's eye and a scientist's sensibility.”—Colm Tóibín

In its landscape, history, language, and folklore, the Connemara region on Ireland’s wild and windswept West Coast is a dramatic and breathtaking place. From its fabled villages, seaside cliffs, bogs, lakes, coral beaches, stark mountains, and ever-meandering country roads lined with stone walls, this rugged kingdom surprises and inspires, and nobody knows this more than artist, cartographer, and celebrated writer Tim Robinson. 

In A Little Gaelic Kingdom, Robinson brings this enchanting Irish peninsula rapturously to life. Setting off, he embarks on a walking journey, traversing and exploring the natural world, while revealing the history, mystery, language, and people that have indelibly shaped this much-mythologized countryside. From the glacial valley of Maam to the fishing villages and rocky shorelines of the region’s archipelago, Robinson carries encyclopedic knowledge, great curiosity, and a deep love of place and its inhabitants with him on this engaging and evocative journey.

Beautifully crafted and intimately rendered, A Little Gaelic Kingdom is a timeless and revelatory work of travel and nature writing. 

“Offering a deeply necessary, clear-eyed look at who we are as flesh-and-bone bodies during the climate crisis, this is a book that searches and finds meaning in both the hard truths and the value of wonder.”—Ada Limón

In this luminous collection of essays, Ellen Wayland-Smith probes the raw edges of human existence, those periods of life in which our bodies remind us of our transience and the boundaries of the self dissolve.

From the Old Testament to Maggie Nelson, these explorations are grounded in a rich network of associations. In an essay on the postpartum body, Wayland-Smith interweaves her experience as a mother with accounts of phantom limbs and Greek mythology to meditate on moments when pieces of our being exist outside our bodies. In order to comprehend diagnoses of depression and breast cancer, she delves into LA hippie culture’s love affair with crystals and Emily Dickinson’s geological poetry. Her experience with chemotherapy leads to reflection on Western medicine and its intolerance of death and the healing capacity of nature. And throughout, she challenges the false separation between the human and the “primeval, animal mode of being.”

At once intimate and expansive, The Science of Last Things peels back layers of human thought and behavior, breaking down our modern conceptions of individuality and reframing us as participants in a world of astounding elegance and mystery.

"These stories are grounded in soul, a deep communion with the belief that we can—and must—rebuild our relationship with the planet.”—Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise

Otherworldly but remarkably familiar, ancestral but firmly rooted in alternate futures, these twelve innovative stories—winners of the Imagine 2200 climate fiction contest organized by Grist—offer a glimpse of a future built on sustainability, inclusivity, and justice. A beekeeper finds purpose and new love after collaborating on a bee-based warning system for floods. An Indian family preserves its traditions through food, dance, and the latest communication fads. After an oceanic rapture, a lone survivor adapts to living in a tree on a small island with a vulture he befriends. Flickers of hope, even joy, illuminate these alternate realities. 

Curated by Grist, the leading media organization dedicated to foregrounding stories of climate change, Metamorphosis is a visionary and speculative collection. Immersive, thought-provoking, and often surprising, these stories serve as a springboard for exploring how fiction can help us envision a tomorrow in which we flourish and thrive.

An intimate and kaleidoscopic entry in the Multiverse series that excavates survival, storytelling, and coming to terms with an unruly mind.

In A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close, the stakes of writing are also the stakes of living. “Though I no longer wanted to die,” writes Lauren Russell, “our first years together were not easy … because I also did not want to live.” From this enigmatic in-between, Russell dives into multitudes: cats and questions; compulsion and devotion; narrative and diagnosis; language and loneliness; scrupulosity and stasis; suicidality and love.

Resisting the neurotypical expectation to choose any one answer arising from her explorations, she invites readers to engage: a pop quiz, a twelve-sided die, an abecedarian confession, a box of mirrors, several idiosyncratic diagnostic tools, and a suite of obsidian waiting rooms. Holding binaries in suspense, Russell seamlessly unfolds and enfolds the various operations of language, moving through forms with the restless brilliance of an architect turned ethicist turned collagist turned origamist. And everything, it seems, finds some way to turn back into poetry.

From psychological evaluation to clickbait, Russell transforms the world’s furious search for explanations into open inquiry. “How flat is the silence in your pocket?” she asks. “Is the inside of a wish an ossuary?” “Do questions stick you to the wall of sociability?” “Did I say I am making my own bestiary?” “What kind of cascade is this?” In a book dedicated to knowing, to not-knowing, and to its readers, Russell pulls back the curtain and invites us in.

A vulnerable and honest collection of poems exploring lineage, love, and the pandemic, from one of the most acclaimed poets of his generation.

“You are told to believe in one paradise / and then there is the paradise you come to know,” begins Rick Barot. What follows is an account of the rich and thorny valley between those poles. Moving the Bones dwells in liminal spaces—of love and memory, the pandemic’s singular domesticity, a serene cemetery of ancestral plots, dawn. In precise and tender verse, Barot captures the particularities of being in the middle of one’s life, reflecting on the joys and sorrows of the past and confronting the inevitabilities that lie ahead.

For Barot, this presence of mind is an art of being lost in thought. “My mind has a slow metabolism, it is slow / to understand what anything means,” he confides, “but understands that if you look at something / long enough, it will have something / to say to you.” Appreciating a Rembrandt, standing in a Goodwill, watching a boy with a flower behind his ear—we encounter ephemeral murmurs of meaning everywhere, but only by slowing down, listening. If we take time to notice the enduring insights of daily moments, if we praise cherry blossoms, lungs, and crying, we might find it easier to bear the loss of a loved one, the sting of solitude, the body’s decline.

By laying bare his own experiences, Barot brings us close enough to witness the lyrical work of consciousness. Patient and attentive, this collection illuminates the everyday and invites us to find pleasure in doing the same, at every stage of life.

Now in paperback! With over 60,000 hardcover copies in print, the astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from U.S. Poet Laureate and MacArthur Fellow Ada Limón.

"I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers," writes Limón. "I am the hurting kind." What does it mean to be the hurting kind? To be sensitive not only to the world's pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world? To divine the relationships between us all? To perceive ourselves in other beings-and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they "do not / care to be seen as symbols"?

With Limón's remarkable ability to trace thought, The Hurting Kind explores those questions-incorporating others' stories and ways of knowing, making surprising turns, and always reaching a place of startling insight. These poems slip through the seasons, teeming with horses and kingfishers and the gleaming eyes of fish. And they honor parents, stepparents, and grandparents: the sacrifices made, the separate lives lived, the tendernesses extended to a hurting child; the abundance, in retrospect, of having two families.

Along the way, we glimpse loss. There are flashes of the pandemic, ghosts whose presence manifests in unexpected memories and the mysterious behavior of pets left behind. But The Hurting Kind is filled, above all, with connection and the delight of being in the world. "Slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still / green in the morning's shade," writes Limón of a groundhog in her garden, "she is doing what she can to survive.

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.”

Chosen by Louise Glück for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, this engrossing debut interrogates history, identity, and the power of poetry to elucidate both.

Motherlands opens with a child drawn early to poetry. “In summer I write. Two lines at a time, two vying souls / running up the wall.” The collection follows this speaker-poet through a childhood in post-Maoist China and an eventual move to the United States, laying bare cultural and linguistic tensions in both historical and modern settings. He cites Chinese laborers toiling in American factories—an echo of the brutalities endured by those who constructed the Transatlantic Railroad—and speaks to anxieties around belonging, assimilation, and identity. “If I forget one character a day,” he writes. “I will have forgotten Chinese / by the end of 2042.”

In these attentive, imaginative poems, Weijia Pan questions the artist’s duty—his duty—as a chronicler of truth, especially through issues of displacement and global injustice. What can the poet do but observe? And yet, in unpacking ancestral traumas connected to Maoist China and modern-day bigotry exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, he still finds himself turning to art as a way to understand both the self and the world at large. Through elegant juxtapositions, Pan crafts an emotional world that is at once regional and universal—Li Bai and Du Fu sit alongside Glenn Gould and Sviatoslav Richter, pepper used to bless new roads is repurposed in the mace used against protesters, two languages compete on a single tongue. Lyrical and visionary, this collection embodies poetry’s capacity to ground us, teach us, and change us.

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.

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.”

“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.

An NPR Best Book of the Year

A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Big Reads Selection

A National Geographic Best Travel Book

Winner of the CLMP Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction

Finalist for the Housatonic Book Award in Nonfiction

Honorable mention for the SEJ Rachel Carson Environment Book Award

“The Quickening is a book of hope.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky

An astonishing, vital work about Antarctica, climate change, and community.

In 2019, fifty-seven scientists and crew set out onboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer. Their destination: the ominous Thwaites Glacier at Antarctica’s western edge. Their goal: to learn as much as possible about this mysterious place, never before visited by humans. And with them is author Elizabeth Rush, who seeks, among other things, the elusive voice of the ice.

Rush shares her story of a groundbreaking voyage punctuated by both the sublime—the tangible consequences of our melting icecaps; the staggering waves of the Drake Passage; the torqued, unfamiliar contours of Thwaites—and the everyday moments of living and working in community. A ping-pong tournament at sea. Long hours in the lab. All the effort that goes into caring for the human and more-than-human worlds. Along the way, Rush takes readers on a personal journey around a more intimate question: What does it mean to create and celebrate life in a time of radical planetary change?

What emerges is a new kind of Antarctica story, one preoccupied not with flag planting and heroism but with the collective and challenging work of imagining a better future. With understanding the language of a continent where humans have only been present for two centuries. With the contributions and concerns of women, who were largely excluded from voyages until the last few decades, and of crew members of color, whose labor has often gone unrecognized. Urgent, brave, and vulnerable, The Quickening is an absorbing account of hope from one of our most celebrated and treasured contemporary authors.

“Deep down, there is just something that draws us to the land, to wild places. We were there to listen to the land.”

When National Geographic Adventurers of the Year Amy and Dave Freeman marry, they set out on an unusual honeymoon: a three-year, 12,000-mile journey across North America. From Alaska’s Inside Passage to Florida’s Key West, they traverse the continent by kayak, canoe, dogsled, and skis, encountering wildlife, sublime landscapes, and harrowing challenges.

Along the way, the Freemans also bear witness to environmental degradation and climate change—from plastic-covered beaches to forest fires to retreating glaciers. And as they engage with Native and rural communities most impacted by the changes resulting from modern industrial society and meet individuals and organizations dedicated to protecting the natural world, their adventure deepens in ways they never imagined.

From the white-knuckle rush of paddling white water to the wonderment of dogsledding across a frosted landscape where caribou and wolves roam, North American Odyssey is a celebration of our interconnectedness to the natural world and to each other. Beautifully written, engagingly told, and inspiring throughout, Amy and Dave Freeman’s story is a clarion call for change in the way we live.

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.”

Copper Nickel is the national literary journal housed at the University of Colorado Denver. It is edited by poet, editor, and translator Wayne Miller (author of five collections, including We the Jury and Post-, coeditor of Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century, and co-translator of Moikom Zeqo’s Zodiac) and co-editor Joanna Luloff (author of Remind Me Again What Happened and The Beach at Galle Road)—along with poetry editors Brian Barker (author of Vanishing Acts, The Black Ocean, and The Animal Gospels) and Nicky Beer (author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes, The Octopus Game and The Diminishing House), and fiction editors Teague Bohlen (author of The Pull of the Earth), Christopher Merkner (author of The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic), and Emily Wortman-Wunder (author of Not a Thing to Comfort You).

Since the journal’s relaunch in 2015, work published in Copper Nickel has been regularly selected for inclusion in Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, Best Small Fictions, Best Literary Translations, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and has often been listed as “notable” in the Best American Essays. According to Clifford Garstang’s 2023 literary journal rankings, Copper Nickel is ranked number 10 for poetry and number 34 for fiction, out of more than 700 regularly publishing literary journals.

Contributors to Copper Nickel have received numerous honors for their work, including the Nobel Prize; the National Book Critics Circle Award; the Pulitzer Prize; the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; the Laughlin Award; the American, California, Colorado, Minnesota, and Washington State Book Awards; the Georg Büchner Prize; the Prix Max Jacob; the Griffin Poetry Prize; the Lenore Marshall Prize; the T. S. Eliot and Forward Prizes; the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award; the Lambda Literary Award; as well as fellowships from the NEA and the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill, Witter Bynner, Soros, Rona Jaffee, Bush, and Jerome Foundations.

Copper Nickel is published twice a year, on March 15 and October 15, and is distributed nationally to bookstores and other outlets by Publishers Group West (PGW) and Accelerate 360.

Issue 38 Includes:

• A Symposium on the work of poet Reginald Shepherd, featuring seven poems by Shepherd and critical appraisals by National Book Award–winner Robin Coste Lewis, National Book Award–finalist Tommye Blount, Rilke Prize–winner Rick Barot, PEN Open Book Margins Award–winner Timothy Liu, Guggenheim Fellow Paisley Rekdal, Lama Rod Owens, Camille Rankine, and Charles Stephens.

• Translation Folios with work by South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon, translated by Cindy Juyong Ok; Italian poet Vivian Lamarque, translated by Geoffrey Brock; German poet Jan Wagner, translated by David Keplinger; Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef, translated by Khaled Mattawa.

• New Poetry by Hurston/Wright Legacy Award–winner Myronn Hardy, Whiting Award–winner Diannely Antigua, Guggenheim Fellow Geoffrey Brock, Amy Lowell Fellow Rebecca Lindenberg, Rome Fellow Mark Halliday, Eric Gregory Award–winner James Conor Patterson, Alice Fay di Castagnola Award–winner Melissa Kwasny, Ruth Lilly Fellow Matthew Nienow, NEA Fellows Traci Brimhall and Chris Forhan, Iowa Poetry Prize–winner Stephanie Choi, and relative newcomers Mya Mateo Alexice, Katie Condon, Saúl Hernández, Dana Isokawa, James Jabar, Tyler Raso, and Cintia Santana.

• New Fiction by Betty Gabehart Prize–winner Jennifer Militello, Fulbright Scholar Matthew Lawrence Garcia, Anthony M. Abboreno, Rebecca Entel, Xavier Balckwell-Lipkind, Randy F. Nelson, and Allyson Stack.

• A New Essay by Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award–winner Hasanthika Sirisena.

• Cover Art by Oakland-based artist Stephanie Syjuco.

Contributor Locations

Contributors to issue 38 come from all over the country and the world.

U.S. cities/regions where contributors are concentrated include:

Denver, CO (home of Copper Nickel and the Copper Nickel staff; contributor Cindy Juyong Ok)

Los Angeles, CA (contributing editors Victoria Chang, Piotr Florczyk, Amaud Jamaul Johnson,

and Chris Santiago)

San Francisco Bay Area, CA (cover artist Stephanie Syjuco; contributing editor Randall Mann)

Atlanta, GA (contributors Lama Rod Owens and Charles Stephens)

Boston/Cambridge, MA (contributor Allison Adair; contributing editors Martha Collins and

Frederick Reiken)

Baltimore, MD (contributors Joseph J. Capista and Carol Quinn)

Detroit, MI (contributors Tommye Blount and Isaac Pickell)

Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN (home of Milkweed Editions; contributing editor V. V.

Ganeshananthan)

Missoula, MT (contributor Melissa Kwasny; contributing editor Sean Hill)

Greensboro, NC (contributors James Jabar and Rhett Iseman Trull; contributing editor Emilia

Phillips)

New York, NY (contributors Dana Isokawa and Maja Lukic)

Pittsburgh, PA (contributors Jan Beatty and Camille Rankine; contributing editors Joy Katz and

Kevin Haworth)

Dallas, TX (contributor Katie Condon; contributing editor Tarfia Faizullah)

Seattle, WA (contributors Rick Barot and Matthew Nienow)

US Cities/Regions with single contributors:

West Hartford, CT (contributor Xavier Blackwell-Lipkind)

Washington, DC (contributor David Keplinger)

Boca Raton, FL (contributing editor A. Papatya Bucak)

Davenport, IA (contributor Anthony M. Abboreno)

Iowa City, IA (contributor Rebecca Entel)

Boise, ID (contributing editor Emily Ruskovich)

Chicago, IL (contributing editor Robert Archambeau)

Indianapolis, IN (contributor Chris Forhan)

Richmond, IN (contributor Christen Noel Kauffman)

Bloomington, IN (contributor Tyler Raso)

Manhattan, KS (contributor Traci Brimhall)

Lexington, KY (contributing editor Ada Limón)

Haverhill, MA (contributor Diannely Antigua)

Lewiston, ME (contributor Myronn Hardy)

Ann Arbor, MI (contributor Khaled Matttawa)

Grand Rapids, MI (contributor Andrew Collard)

Kansas City, MO (contributing editor Robert Long Foreman)

Saint Louis, MO (contributing editor Niki Herd)

Davidson, NC (contributor Randy F. Nelson)

Lincoln, NE (contributor James Brunton)

Manchester, NH (contributor Jennifer Millitello)

Jersey City, NJ (contributor Mya Matteo Alexice)

Princeton, NJ (contributing editor James Richardson)

Canton, NY (contributing editor Pedro Ponce)

Woodstock, NY (contributor Timothy Liu)

Athens, OH (contributor Mark Halliday)

Cincinnati, OH (contributor Rebecca Lindenberg)

Tulsa, OK (contributing editor Kaveh Bassiri)

Ashland, OR (contributor Cynthia Boersma)

Selinsgrove, PA (contributor Hasanthika Sirisena)

Philadelphia, PA (contributing editor Adrienne Perry)

Greenville, SC (contributor Emily Cinquemani)

Sewanee, TN (contributor Stephanie Choi)

San Antonio, TX (contributor Saúl Hernández)

St. George, UT (contributor Cindy King)

Salt Lake City, UT (contributor Paisley Rekdal)

Middlebury, VT (contributor Carolyn Orosz)

Houston, TX (contributing editor Kevin Prufer)

Blacksburg, VA (contributing editor Janine Joseph)

International contributors live in:

Düsseldorf, GERMANY (Matthew Lawrence Garcia)

Milan, ITALY (Vivian Lamarque)

Seoul, SOUTH KOREA (Kim Hyesoon)

Edinburgh, UNITED KINGDOM (Allyson Stack)

London, UNITED KINGDOM (James Conor Patterson)

Copper Nickel is the national literary journal housed at the University of Colorado Denver. It is edited by poet, editor, and translator Wayne Miller (author of five collections, including We the Jury and Post-, coeditor of Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century, and co-translator of Moikom Zeqo’s Zodiac) and co-editor Joanna Luloff (author of the novel Remind Me Again What Happened and the story collection The Beach at Galle Road)—along with poetry editors Brian Barker (author of Vanishing Acts, The Black Ocean, and The Animal Gospels) and Nicky Beer (author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes, The Octopus Game and The Diminishing House), and fiction editors Teague Bohlen (author of The Pull of the Earth), Alexander Lumans (whose work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Gulf Coast, The Paris Review, Story Quarterly, and elsewhere), and Christopher Merkner (author of The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic).

 Since the journal’s relaunch in 2015, work published in Copper Nickel has been regularly selected for inclusion in Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, Best Small Fictions, Best Literary Translations, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and has often been listed as “notable” in the Best American Essays. According to Clifford Garstang’s US literary journal rankings, Copper Nickel is ranked number 10 for poetry and number 34 for fiction, out of more than 700 regularly publishing literary journals.

 Contributors to Copper Nickel have received numerous honors for their work, including the Nobel Prize; the National Book Critics Circle Award; the Pulitzer Prize; the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; the Laughlin Award; the American, California, Colorado, Minnesota, and Washington State Book Awards; the Georg Büchner Prize; the Prix Max Jacob; the Lenore Marshall Prize; the T. S. Eliot and Forward Prizes; the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award; the Lambda Literary Award; as well as fellowships from the NEA and the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill, Witter Bynner, Soros, Rona Jaffee, Bush, and Jerome Foundations.

 Copper Nickel is published twice a year, on March 15 and October 15, and is distributed nationally to bookstores and other outlets by Publishers Group West (PGW) and Accelerate 360.

Issue 37 Includes:

 • Poetry Translation Folios with work by Ukrainian poet Alex Averbuch, translated by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky; Russian poet Anzhelina Polonskaya, translated by Andrew Wachtel; and Italian fiction writer Elena Varvello, translated by Jennifer Panek.

 • A feature of poems by three South American poets—Claudia Magliano from Uruguay, Eliana Hernández Pachón from Colombia, and Úrsula Starke from Chile—edited by Jesse Lee Kercheval and featuring a Q&A with both the poets and the translators.

 • New Poetry by International Latino Book Award–winner William Archila; NEA Fellows Michael Bazzett and Amy Beeder; Lambda Literary Award–winner Benjamin S. Grossberg; Kate Tufts Discovery Award–finalist Julie Hanson; Grolier Prize–winner John Hodgen; four-time Pushcart Prize–winner Mark Irwin; Jake Adam York Prize–winners Yalie Saweda Kamara and Christopher Brean Murray; Audre Lorde Award–winners Meg Day and Maureen Seaton; relative newcomers Mansi Dahal, Christine Kwon, Weijia Pan, Patrick Wilcox, Alison Zheng; and many others.

 • New Fiction by Stephanie Carpenter, Becky Hagenston, Jacqueline Kolosov, and Luke Rolfes/

 • New Essays by TS Eliot Award–winner and National Book Critics Circle Finalist Sinéad Morrissey and Anne P. Beatty.

 • Cover Art by New York–based Native-American “photo-weaving” artist, Sarah Sense.

Contributor Locations

Contributors to issue 37 come from all over the country and the world.

U.S. cities/regions where contributors are concentrated include:

Denver, CO (home of Copper Nickel and the Copper Nickel staff; contributors Andrew Hemmert and

Maureen Seaton)

Los Angeles, CA (contributors William Archila, Mark Irwin, and Michael Mark; contributing editors

Victoria Chang, Piotr Florczyk, Amaud Jamaul Johnson, and Chris Santiago)

Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN (home of Milkweed Editions; contributors Mair Allen and Michael

Bazzett; contributing editor V. V. Ganeshananthan)

Houston, TX (contributors Ayokunle Falomo, Christopher Brean Murray, and Weijia Pan;

contributing editor Kevin Prufer)

New York, NY (contributors Mansi Dahal, Eliana Herández Pachón, and Tyler Mills)

Chicago, IL (contributors Oksana Maksymchuk and Michael Robins; contributing editor Robert

Archambeau)

San Francisco Bay Area, CA (contributor Alison Zheng; contributing editor Randall Mann)

Kansas City, MO (contributor Patrick Wilcox; contributing editor Robert Long Foreman)

Greensboro, NC (contributor Anne P. Beatty; contributing editor Emilia Phillips)

Dallas, TX (contributor Mag Gabbert; contributing editor Tarfia Faizullah)

Boston/Cambridge, MA (contributing editors Martha Collins and Frederick Reiken)

Pittsburgh, PA (contributing editors Joy Katz and Kevin Haworth)

Maryville, MO (contributors John Gallaher and Luke Rolphes)

US Cities/Regions with single contributors:

West Hartford, CT (contributor Benjamin S. Grossberg)

Cedar Rapids, IA (contributor Julie Hanson)

Dubuque, IA (contributor Jeannine Marie Pitas)

New Orleans, LA (contributor Christine Kwon)

Worcester, MA (contributor John Hodgen)

Frederick, MD (contributor Elizabeth Knapp)

Hannock, MI (contributor Stephanie Carpenter)

Grand Rapids, MI (contributor L. S. Klatt)

Starkville, MS (contributor Becky Hagenston)

Raleigh, NC (contributor Meg Day)

Omaha, NE (contributor Trey Moody)

Albuquerque, NM (contributor Amy Beeder)

Cincinnati, OH (contributor Yalie Saweda Kamara)

Easton, PA (contributor Owen McLeod)

Lubbock, TX (contributor Jacqueline Kolosov)

Lexington, VA (contributor Seth Michelson)

Bellingham, WA (contributor Jeffrey Morgan)

Ellensburg, WA (contributor Maya Jewell Zeller)

Eau Claire, WI (contributor Dorothy Chan)

Madison, WI  (contributor Jesse Lee Kercheval)

Ottawa, Ontario (contributor Jennifer Panek)

Philadelphia, PA (contributing editor Adrienne Perry)

Washington, DC (contributing editor David Keplinger)

Boca Raton, FL (contributing editor A. Papatya Bucak)

Boise, ID (contributing editor Emily Ruskovich)

Lexington, KY (contributing editor Ada Limón)

Princeton, NJ (contributing editor James Richardson)

Canton, NY (contributing editor Pedro Ponce)

Saint Louis, MO (contributing editor Niki Herd)

Missoula, MT (contributing editor Sean Hill)

Tulsa, OK (contributing editor Kaveh Bassiri)

Blacksburg, VA (contributing editor Janine Joseph)

International contributors live in:

Montevideo, Uruguay

Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK

Mexico City, MX

San Bernardo, Chile

Turin, Italy

Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

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.

In Crossing Bully Creek, acclaimed author Margaret Erhart chronicles change through generations. As the scion of a large Southern plantation lies dying in the late 1960s, the various people who know him recall his life, including his wife, Rowena; his servant Rutha; his granddaughter; and the plantation manager.

At the story's heart is the owner of Longbrow Plantation, Henry Detroit—now on his deathbed as the 1960s come to a close. Around him swirl servants, retainers, workers, and family, all gathered to preside over his death, and the death of life as they know it in the South.

The book moves back and forth from the 1920s to the 1960s. From Henry's wife Rowena, to the servant Rutha, from his saucy granddaughter to the man running the plantation for his son, characters white and black move through a time when old traditions linger, yet begin to give way—subtly transformed through the small, determined acts.

In a collection by the author of The Grass Dancer, a Sioux spirit travels the night sky in search of good dreams that are rendered true when he consumes them, from a Sioux elder's hope to return to her prairie home to a Harvard student's reevaluation of the learning process.

Roofwalker, made up of a unique combination of fiction and nonfiction, or "stories" and "histories," reveals the ways that native traditions and beliefs work in the lives of characters who live far from the reservation—and in the author’s own life. Many of the "histories" repeat subjects and themes found in the "stories," making Roofwalker a book in which spirits and the living commingle and Sioux culture and modern life collide with disarming power, humor, and joy.

The first seven pieces in the book are "stories," fictional accounts primarily of girls and women. In the title story, a young girl believes in the power of the "roofwalker" spirit to make her dreams come true. In "Beaded Souls," a woman is cursed by the sin of her great-grandfather, an Indian policeman who arrested Sitting Bull. "First Fruits" follows a native girl’s first-year at Harvard.

The nonfiction pieces include Power’s imaginary account of the meeting of her Phi Beta Kappa father and Sioux mother, a piece about the letters of an Irish ancestor and another in which Power and her mother visit the Field Museum in Chicago, where a native ancestor’s dress is on display.

“Beautifully written, The Eighth Moon uses a very light touch to probe the most essential, unresolvable questions of belief, kinship, fidelity, history, and identity.”—Chris Kraus

A rebellion, guns, and murder. When Jennifer Kabat moves to the Catskills, she has no idea it was the site of the Anti-Rent War, an early episode of American rural populism. 

As she forges friendships with her new neighbors and explores the countryside on logging roads and rutted lanes—finding meadows dotted with milkweed in bloom, saffron salamanders, a blood moon rising over Munsee, Oneida, and Mohawk land—she slowly learns of the 1840s uprising, when poor tenant farmers fought to redistribute their landlords’ vast estates. In the farmers’ socialist dreams, she discovers connections to her parents’ collectivist values, as well as to our current moment. Threaded with historical documents, the natural world, and the work of writers like Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Hardwick, Kabat weaves a capacious memoir, where the past comes alive in the present. 

Rich with unexpected correspondences and discoveries, this visionary and deeply compassionate debut gives us a new way of seeing and being in place—one in which everything is intertwined and all at once. 

An imaginative reworking of the elegy that focuses on the difficult work of being with the dying.

At the heart of The Cloud Path, celebrated author Melissa Kwasny’s seventh collection of poetry, lies the passing of her beloved mother: the caretaking, the hospice protocols, the last breath, the aftermath. Simultaneously, she must also reckon with an array of global crises: environmental decline, the arrival of a pandemic, divisive social tensions. With so much loss building up around her, Kwasny turns to the natural world for guidance, walking paths lined with aspen, snow geese, and prickly pears. “I have come here for their peace and instructions,” she writes, listening to the willows, the “slant rhyme of their multi-limbed clatter.”

What she finds is a new, more seasoned kind of solace. The Cloud Path glimmers with nature’s many lively colors—the “burnt orange” of foxes, “cedar / bark cast in the greenest impasto,” white swans intertwined. It also embraces the world’s harsher elements—a dark bog’s purple stench, a hayfield empty of birds. Witnessing life’s constant ebb and flow, the weight of personal and collective grief gradually becomes lighter. The shapes of clouds, cattle bones by the river. “Why not,” she asks, “believe it matters?

Evocative and wrenching, The Cloud Path compels us to consider the whole of living and dying. An elegant juxtaposition of personal and planetary loss, these keen and tender poems teach us to see afresh in the lateness of things.

An authoritative volume representing the vast oeuvre of one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant and visionary poets.

Widely regarded as some of the most important and innovative poetry from postwar Europe, Tomaž Šalamun’s work offers a singularly thrilling reading experience. Sharp and subtle, Šalamun’s rhythms intertwine with an incantatory force; his prescient, liberatory politics and poetics pulse like a heartbeat. In Kiss the Eyes of Peace, the histories of Slovenia, the former Yugoslavia, and Europe are broken into kaleidoscopic harmonies of terror and joy: friends and family talk to each other under the sun as snow, apples, and deer mingle with blood and bones, with salt and cabbage, with gold, silk, and wine, and with God and heaven in the sand and grass.

“Love tore apart all my theories,” writes Šalamun. His oracular poems, suffused with mystic pronouncements that confound and delight, are as moving as they are eerie. And yet, if “every true poet is a monster,” Šalamun’s profound imagination also offers us peace—grace, even—in the wildness and wilderness of his art: “May everything erupt on a clear day, just as it is, / into sacredness and the beauty of the gift: life.”

Translated from the Slovenian and curated by esteemed author and translator Brian Henry, and with a Foreword from award-winning author Ilya Kaminsky, this expansive arrangement is the first of its kind to offer a comprehensive English-language retrospective of Šalamun’s storied career.

“My language was born among trees,
it holds the taste of earth;
my ancestors’ tongue is my home.”
—from “The Old Song of the Blood”

A legacy of land and language courses through the pages of this spirited bilingual edition, offering an expansive take on the internationally renowned work of Humberto Ak’abal, a K’iche’ Maya poet born in the western highlands of Guatemala.

Featuring both Ak’abal’s Spanish translations from the indigenous K’iche’ and English translations by acclaimed poet Michael Bazzett, this collection blossoms from the landscape of Momostenango—mountains covered in cloud forest, deep ravines, terraced fields of maize. Ak’abal’s unpretentious verse models a contraconquista—counter-conquest—perspective, one that resists the impulse to impose meaning on the world and encourages us to receive it instead. “In church,” he writes, “the only prayer you hear / comes from the trees / they turned into pews.” Every living thing has its song, these poems suggest. We need only listen for it.

Attuned, uncompromising, Ak’abal teaches readers to recognize grace in every earthly observation—in the wind, carrying a forgotten name. In the roots, whose floral messengers “tell us / what earth is like / on the inside.” Even in the birds, who “sing in mid-flight / and shit while flying.” At turns playful and pointed, this prescient entry in the Seedbank series is a transcendent celebration of both K’iche’ indigeneity and Ak’abal’s lifetime of work.

In this sweeping epic, full of love and loss, a woman from one of the last remote reindeer-herding tribes of northeastern China tells the story of her family and the last century of her country’s history.

“A long-time confidante of the rain and snow, I am ninety years old. The rain and snow have weathered me, and I too have weathered them.”

At dawn, an elder sits among the birch trees while the rest of her tribe descend the mountain to permanently inhabit the town at its base. A member of the nomadic Evenki tribe, who traverse the forested mountains of China’s eastern edge with herds of reindeer, she tells the tale of her life to the rain and fire, a life lived in close communion with nature at its most beautiful and cruel. Over the course of the twentieth century, her world is pushed to the margins of empire and industrialization. But holding steadfast against the fray of Chinese, Japanese, and Russian nation-building and resource extraction is the elder’s abiding and tender attention to her people’s core relationships—human, animal, spiritual, environmental—which in itself becomes an act of resistance.

In Bruce Humes’s illuminating translation, acclaimed author Chi Zijian renders an Evenki experience of interdependence and reciprocity with the natural world, where wilderness is infused with domestic life and spiritual intervention—reindeer herding and ice fishing, Shamanic songs and rites, and tallies of marriages, births, and deaths. Contending with the preservation of tradition and legacy alongside the threat of progress and displacement, Zijian depicts lives that resist the march of modernization, speaking profoundly to the real endangerment of Indigenous communities and knowledge across the world. 

A meditation on art’s longevity and the brevity of human life from the highly acclaimed, award-winning author of Frail-Craft and Inmost.

Jessica Fisher brings “the faraway close,” through ruthless yet tender interrogations of possibility and permanence. Set against the backdrop of the fallen empire of Rome, Daywork takes its title from the giornata—the name in fresco painting for the section of wet plaster that can be painted in a single day, where each “day” is marked by the hidden seams in a finished painting.

In a voice that is as poised as it is unmistakably urgent, Fisher aims to uncover what adheres against the fabric of history, and what becomes effaced over time. Her search leads her to discover signs of ruin of a different kind, and her poems begin to coalesce around a single perilous realization: that time is not merely an agent of erasure. Time is also a tether, rendering violence, beauty, grief, and art separate merely by a matter of days. “So you see once again,” she writes, “violence is to beauty / as the warp to the weft / always somewhere beneath.”

Like the fresco itself, Daywork is committed to a time- and site-specific art, and to the daily work of creation. At once an elegiac meditation and a brave unearthing, this book expertly discerns the monumentalizing portrayals of history and its violences, while boldly illuminating other crucial accounts of everyday existence.

A penetrating and encompassing English-language translation from the celebrated French poet touching on death, domesticity, nature, language itself, and—always—the body.

French literary icon Marie-Claire Bancquart (1932–2019) is known for an uncanny inhabitation of the concrete, finding whole worlds, even afterlives, in daily instances and spaces. “If I could seize a little nothing / a bit of nothing,” she muses, “all things would come to me / those that dance / in its cloth.” The tiniest moments can be acts of utterance, defiance, communion, and immortality. Yet death does indeed appear in the everyday, though it’s more than a fact of existence. It is fiction as well, small cunning stories we create so we’re not merely waiting for it: “one sets / close by / the pot of orange flowers / the here and now / to block the view.”

Here, the infinitesimal has no end; the smaller life gets, the deeper and more carefully Bancquart has us pause to notice its offerings. Though for her “the body” is the surest, most trustworthy way of knowing, the mystery of language is often referenced, and reverenced. And translator Jody Gladding, an award-winning poet herself, beautifully carries forward Bancquart’s lifetime of distinctive work. Every Minute Is First is lean, lucid yet philosophical poetry, reflecting visceral life and experiential thought, walking in the dark with a light, lighting words—or alighting on them—in their own incandescent power to make the long-lived journey meaningful.

An aching meditation on the cyclical nature of grief and memory’s limited capacity to preserve everything time takes from us.

How does one make sense of loss—personal and collective? When language and memory are at capacity, where do we turn? Confronted with “a year meant to end all / those to come,” acclaimed poet Adam Clay questions whether anything is “wide enough to contain what’s left / of hope.” In the absence of a clear way forward, the poems of Circle Back wander grief’s strange and winding path. Along the way, the line between reality and dreams blurs: cows stare with otherworldly eyes, 78s play under cactus needles, a father becomes his own child, and the dead become something more complicated—a “sketch turned to painting / left in a room dusty from / lack of passing through.”

But amidst these liminal landscapes, a “thread of promise” persists in poetry. As flawed as language is, we still turn to it for longevity, for love, like “Keats, / sketching himself back into place.” Vulnerable and nuanced, Clay details the difficult work of healing—and in doing so, captures those needful moments of reprieve in grief’s “strange circle.” Two friends dashing through a sprinkler. A garden of startled birds. Out for a run some gray morning: a sudden patch of wildflowers. Circle Back is a bared heart, one readers will find as thoughtful as it is tender.

“I was in the car the first time music seemed strange: the instruments less distinct, the vocals less crisp.” 

John Cotter was thirty years old when he first began to notice a ringing in his ears. Soon the ringing became a roar inside his head. Next came partial deafness, then dizziness and vertigo that rendered him unable to walk, work, sleep, or even communicate. At a stage of life when he expected to be emerging fully into adulthood, teaching and writing books, he found himself “crippled and dependent,” and in search of care. 

 When he is first told that his debilitating condition is likely Ménière’s Disease, but that there is “no reliable test, no reliable treatment, and no consensus on its cause,” Cotter quits teaching, stops writing, and commences upon a series of visits to doctors and treatment centers. What begins as an expedition across the country navigating and battling the limits of the American healthcare system, quickly becomes something else entirely: a journey through hopelessness and adaptation to disability. Along the way, hearing aids become inseparable from his sense of self, as does a growing understanding that the possibilities in his life are narrowing rather than expanding. And with this understanding of his own travails comes reflection on age-old questions around fate, coincidence, and making meaning of inexplicable misfortune. 

 A devastating memoir that sheds urgent, bracingly honest light on both the taboos surrounding disability and the limits of medical science, Losing Music is refreshingly vulnerable and singularly illuminating—a story that will make readers see their own lives anew.

Winner of the American Book Award
Winner of the Montana Book Award
Winner of the PNBA Book Award

“In my seventh winter, when my head only reached my Appe’s rib, a White Man came into camp. Bare trees scratched sky. Cold was endless. He moved through trees like strikes of sunlight. My Bia said he came with bad intentions, like a Water Baby’s cry.”

Among the most memorialized women in American history, Sacajewea served as interpreter and guide for Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery. In this visionary novel, acclaimed Indigenous author Debra Magpie Earling brings this mythologized figure vividly to life, casting unsparing light on the men who brutalized her and recentering Sacajewea as the arbiter of her own history.

Here, the young Sacajewea is bright and bold, growing strong from the hard work of “learning all ways to survive.” When her village is raided, Sacajewea is kidnapped and then gambled away to Charbonneau, a French Canadian trapper. Heavy with grief, she learns how to survive at the edge of a strange new world. When Lewis and Clark’s expedition party arrives, Sacajewea knows she must cross a vast and brutal terrain with her newborn son, the white man who owns her, and a company of men who wish to conquer and commodify the world she loves.

Written in lyrical, dreamlike prose, The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is an astonishing work of art and a powerful tale of perseverance—the Indigenous woman’s story that hasn’t been told.

“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.

From the acclaimed author of Thin Places, a luminous day book about an unexpected year and finding home.

Two days after the winter solstice in 2019, Kerri and her partner moved to a remote cottage in the heart of Ireland. They were looking for a home, somewhere to settle into a stable life. Then the pandemic arrived and their secluded abode became a place of enforced isolation. What was meant to be the beginning of an enriching new chapter was instead marked by uncertainty and fear. The seasons still passed, the swallows returned, the rhythms of the natural world went on, but in many ways 2020 was unlike any year we had seen before. And for Kerri there would be one more change: a baby, longed for but utterly, beautifully unexpected.

Intensely lyrical, fragmentary in subject and form, Cacophony of Bone is an ode to a year, a place, and a love that transformed a life. When the pandemic came, time seemed to shapeshift; in Kerri’s elegant prose, we can trace its quickening, its slowing. She maps the circle of a year—a journey from one place to another, field notes of a life—from one winter to the next, telling of a changed life in a changed world, as well as all that stays the same. All that keeps on living and breathing, nesting and dying. This is a book for the reader who wants to slow down, guided by a voice that is utterly singular, “rich and strange,” (Robert Macfarlane). A book about home—the deepening of family, the connections that sustain us.

Issue 36 Includes:

• Poetry Translation Folios with work by Chinese poet Zhang Zhihao, translated by Yuemin He; French surrealist Joyce Mansour, translated C. Francis Fisher; and Vietnamese poet Tuę Sỹ,translated by Martha Collins and Nguyen Ba Chung.

• A feature on working class, Jewish, LA-based poet Bert Meyers.

• New Poetry by MacArthur “Genius” grant winner Campbell McGrath; Los Angeles Poet Laureate Lynn Thompson; Guggenheim Fellow Michael Waters; Georgia Poet Laureate and NEA Fellow Chelsea Rathburn; Readers’ Choice Award recipient Sandra Simonds; Yellen Fellow Vandana Khanna; Cave Canem and Margaret Bridgman fellow Gary Jackson; NEA Fellow Oliver de la Paz; as well as emerging poets Rita Mookerjee, Bunkong Tuon, Zack Strait, Seif-Eldeine, Joshua Aiken, and many others.

• New Fiction by Flannery O’Connor Award winner Siamak Vossoughi, Pushcart Prize “special mentions” S. Shankar and Mike Alberti, Connecticut Office of the Arts Fellow David Ryan, Cos Barnes Fellow Julia Ridley Smith, and emerging writers Joshua Pearson and Josie Tolin.

• New Essays by Guggenheim Fellow Mark Halliday and emerging essayist Ari Ketzal.

• Cover Art by a New York–based British-Liberian visual artist, Lina Iris Viktor.

The North American debut of Tuệ Sỹ—poet, monk, scholar, dissident, and one of the great cultural figures of modern Vietnam—and a new bilingual edition to the Seedbank series.

In addition to being a preeminent scholar of world philosophy and a Zen master, Tuệ Sỹ is one of Vietnam’s most celebrated poets. He is a survivor of sixteen years of imprisonment and an eloquent witness to the tumult, tragedy, and resilience of his country over the last sixty years—and a full-length translation of his work into English is long overdue.

Assembled and co-translated by Vietnamese poet and essayist Nguyen Ba Chung and acclaimed American poet Martha Collins, Dreaming the Mountain reflects a lifetime of creation, crisis, and commitment. With poems presented on facing pages in Vietnamese and English, this volume includes the early imagism of Tuệ Sỹ’s Zen studies as a scholar and critic, midlife work that represents his attempted retreat from the devastation of war and subsequent years of imprisonment, and late, elliptical poems that give intensely lyrical expression to a lifetime of profound experience. From the “fleeting dream of red blood at dusk” to the quiet determination of one who sets out to “repaint the dawn,” these poems reflect the journey of an artist who speaks for his country, who captures its darkness and its light.

At once personal and universal, coolly observant and deeply compassionate, the poems of Tuệ Sỹ bring singular attention to a fleeting, painfully beautiful 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.

Winner of the Montana Book Award

From the award-winning author of Perma Red comes a devastatingly beautiful novel that challenges prevailing historical narratives of Sacajewea.

“In my seventh winter, when my head only reached my Appe’s rib, a White Man came into camp. Bare trees scratched sky. Cold was endless. He moved through trees like strikes of sunlight. My Bia said he came with bad intentions, like a Water Baby’s cry.”

Among the most memorialized women in American history, Sacajewea served as interpreter and guide for Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery. In this visionary novel, acclaimed Indigenous author Debra Magpie Earling brings this mythologized figure vividly to life, casting unsparing light on the men who brutalized her and recentering Sacajewea as the arbiter of her own history.

Raised among the Lemhi Shoshone, in this telling the young Sacajewea is bright and bold, growing strong from the hard work of “learning all ways to survive”: gathering berries, water, roots, and wood; butchering buffalo, antelope, and deer; catching salmon and snaring rabbits; weaving baskets and listening to the stories of her elders. When her village is raided and her beloved Appe and Bia are killed, Sacajewea is kidnapped and then gambled away to Charbonneau, a French Canadian trapper.

Heavy with grief, Sacajewea learns how to survive at the edge of a strange new world teeming with fur trappers and traders. When Lewis and Clark’s expedition party arrives, Sacajewea knows she must cross a vast and brutal terrain with her newborn son, the white man who owns her, and a company of men who wish to conquer and commodify the world she loves.

Written in lyrical, dreamlike prose, The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is an astonishing work of art and a powerful tale of perseverance—the Indigenous woman’s story that hasn’t been told.

Selected by Maggie Smith for the 2023 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, this debut collection of poems explores the aftermath of history’s most powerful forces: devotion, disaster, and us.

Rooted in the Gulf Coast, A History of Half-Birds measures the line between love and ruin. Part poet, part anthropologist, Caroline Harper New digs into dark places—a cave, a womb, a hurricane—to trace how violence born of devotion manifests not only in our human relationships, but also in our connections to the natural and animal worlds. Everywhere in these pages, tenderness is coupled with brutality: a deer eats a baby bird, a lover restrains another. “I promised / a love poem,” New proclaims, then teaches us about the anglerfish, how it “attracts its mate / and prey with the same lure.”

In New’s exceptional voice, familiar concepts take on a shade of the fantastic. A woman tastes the earth for acidity, buries lemons and pennies for balance. Limestone “sucks the sea / into little demitasse” and hyacinths “sip the sun / black.” A lone elephant wanders into the wilderness of rural Georgia, never to be seen again. But perhaps most arresting about New’s work are the truths told by its strangeness, like the ancient fish who “carved their shape” in a mountain’s peak, or a mother who wears a lifejacket in the bathtub.

Crafted by New’s voracious mind and carried by her matchless lyricism, A History of Half-Birds is a stunning investigation of love’s beastly impulses—all it protects, and all it destroys.

The latest in the Seedbank series, the debut in English of a groundbreaking Indigenous poet of the Americas.

In a fiercely personal yet authoritative voice, prolific contemporary poet Mikeas Sánchez explores the worldview of the Zoque people of southern Mexico. Her paced, steely lyrics fuse cosmology, lineage, feminism, and environmental activism into a singular body of work that stands for the self and the collective in the same instant. “I am woman and I celebrate every vein,” she writes, “where I guard my ancestors’ secrets / every Zoque man’s word in my mouth / every Zoque woman’s wisdom in my spit.”

How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems examines the intersection of Zoque struggles against colonialism and empire, and those of North African immigrants and refugees. Sánchez encountered the latter in Barcelona as a revelation, “spreading their white blankets on the ground / as if they’ll soon return to sea / flying the sail of the promised land / the land that became a mirage.” Other works bring us just as close to similarly imperiled relatives, ancestors, gods, and archetypal Zoque men and women that Sánchez addresses with both deeply prophetic and childlike love.

Coming from the only woman to ever publish a book of poetry in Zoque and Spanish, this timely, powerful collection pairs the bilingual originals with an English translation for the first time. This book is for anyone interested in poetry as knowledge, proclaimed with both feet squarely set on ancient ground.

The How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems audiobook read by Mikeas Sánchez, Wendy Call, and Shook is available everywhere you listen to audiobooks.

It is 2027. August Helm is thirty years old. A biochemist working in a lab at the University of Chicago, he is swept off his feet by the beautiful and entirely self-assured Amanda Clark. Animated by August’s consuming desire, their relationship quickly becomes intimate. But when he stumbles across a liaison between the director of his lab and a much younger student, his position is eliminated and his world upended.

August sets out to visit his parents in Words, an unincorporated village in the heart of Wisconsin’s Driftless Area. Here, he reconnects with several characters from his past: Ivan Bookchester, who now advocates for “new ways of living” in an age of decline; Hanh, formerly known as Jewelweed, who tends her orchard and wild ginseng, keenly attuned to new patterns of migration resulting from climate change and habitat destruction; and Lester Mortal, the aging veteran and fierce pacifist who long ago rescued her from Vietnam. Together, the old friends fall back into a familiar closeness.

But much as things initially seem unchanged in the Driftless, when August is hired to look after Tom and April Lux’s home in Forest Gate, he finds himself in the midst of an entirely different social set, made up of wealthy homeowners who are mostly resented by the poorer surrounding communities, and distanced in turn by their fear of the locals. August soon falls head over heels for April, and different versions of his self collide: one in which the past is still present in tensions and dreams, another in which he understands his desire as genetically determined and chemically induced, and then a vaguely hoped-for future with April. When Lester is diagnosed with liver cirrhosis, Ivan comes clean on a ghastly past episode, and April makes a shocking revelation, a series of events ensues that will change all involved forever.   

As approachable as it is profound in exploring the human condition and our shared need for community, this is a story for our times.

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. 

In The Wanting Way, the second book in Multiverse—a literary series written and curated by the neurodivergent—Adam Wolfond proves more than willing to “extend the choreography.”

In fact, his entire thrust is out and toward. Each poem moves out along its own underutilized pathway, awakening unseen dimensions for the reader like a wooded night walk suddenly lit by fireflies. And as each path elaborates itself, Wolfond’s guiding hand seems always to stay held out to the reader, inviting them further into a shared and unprecedented unfolding. 

The Wanting Way is actually a confluence of diverse ways—rallies, paths, waves, jams, streams, desire lines—that converge wherever the dry verbiage of the talking world requires hydration. Each poem is an invitation to bathe in the play of languaging. And each poem is an invitation to a dance that’s already happening, called into motion by the objects and atmospheres of a more-than-human world. Wolfond makes space for new poetics, new choreographies, and new possibilities toward forging a consensual—felt and feeling—world where we might find free disassembly and assembly together. 

There is a neurodivergent universe within this one, and Wolfond’s poems continuously pull back the unnecessary veil between human and nature. 

“How grateful I am for the chance to join this generous author’s lyrical, intimate, and revelatory conversations with birds!” —Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus

“Birds are my almanac. They tune me into the seasons, and into myself.”

A Vulture 2023 Best Book of the Year

John Cotter was thirty years old when he first began to notice a ringing in his ears. Soon the ringing became a roar inside his head. Next came partial deafness, then dizziness and vertigo that rendered him unable to walk, work, sleep, or even communicate. At a stage of life when he expected to be emerging fully into adulthood, teaching and writing books, he found himself “crippled and dependent,” and in search of care. 

 When he is first told that his debilitating condition is likely Ménière’s Disease, but that there is “no reliable test, no reliable treatment, and no consensus on its cause,” Cotter quits teaching, stops writing, and commences upon a series of visits to doctors and treatment centers. What begins as an expedition across the country navigating and battling the limits of the American healthcare system, quickly becomes something else entirely: a journey through hopelessness and adaptation to disability. Along the way, hearing aids become inseparable from his sense of self, as does a growing understanding that the possibilities in his life are narrowing rather than expanding. And with this understanding of his own travails comes reflection on age-old questions around fate, coincidence, and making meaning of inexplicable misfortune. 

 A devastating memoir that sheds urgent, bracingly honest light on both the taboos surrounding disability and the limits of medical science, Losing Music is refreshingly vulnerable and singularly illuminating—a story that will make readers see their own lives anew.

Issue 34 Includes

• Poetry Translation Folios with work by Guatemalan K’iche Maya poet Humberto Ak’ab’al, translated by Michael Bazzett; Lithuania superstar poet Tomaž Šalamun, translated by Brian Henry; Spanish poet Sandra Santana, translated by Geoffrey Brock; and Venezuelan poet-in-exile Jesüs Amalio, translated by David Brunson, Jr. Plus a Fiction Translation Folio with two stories by nternationally renowned Portuguese writer Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, translated by Alexis Levitin.

• Poetry by National Book Critics Circle Award winner Ada Limón; Guggenheim Fellows Paul Guest and Mark Halliday; Ruth Lilly Fellow Marcus Wicker; William Carlos Williams Awardwinner Martha Collins; Rilke Prize winner David Keplinger; NEA Fellows Michael Bazzett, Brian Henry, Lance Larsen, Alex Lemon, Jenny Molberg, and Corey Van Landingham; as well as Kelli Russell Agodon, Abdul Ali, Sean Cho A., Michael Dumanis, Chanda Feldman, Melissa Ginsburg, Matty Layne Glasgow, Niki Herd, Alicia Mountain, Lis Sanchez, Indriani Sengupta, and many others.

• Fiction by Madeline Haze Curtis, Maria Poulatha, Alyssa Quinn, Kate Weinberg, and Tara Isabel Zambrano.

• Nonfiction by Brooke Barry and Robert Long Foreman.

• The cover features a recent piece by Minneapolis-based artist Dyani White Hawk, whose work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Walker Art Center, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the

Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and elsewhere.

As game to follow a beckoning Laura Palmer into the burning woods as she is to step into the shoes of Little Red Riding Hood as she lays waste to her wolf, LaPointe explores the sublime space between beauty and danger through lush, almost baroque, use of folktale and color. Red, white, blue, and an amalgam that is none of the above—rose—vie for the speaker’s embrace as a mixed-race woman. Here, poems become offerings, rituals, incantations conjured in the name of healing and power.

Like the stones and cards laid on an altar, Rose Quartz offers a reading at the intersection of identity and myth, trauma and truth, telling the story of past, present, and future.

Somewhere between elegy and memoir, poetry and prose, Ed Pavlić’s Call It in the Air follows the death of a sister into song.

Pavlić’s collection traces the life and death of his elder sister, Kate: a brilliant, talented, tormented woman who lived on her own terms to the very end. Kate’s shadow hovers like a penumbra over these pages that unfold a kaleidoscope of her world. A small-town apartment full of “paintings & burritos & pyramid-shaped empty bottles of Patron & an ad hoc anthology of vibrators.” A banged-up Jeep, loose syringes underfoot, rattles under Colorado skies. Near an ICU bed, Pavlić agonizes over the most difficult questions, while doctors “swish off to the tune of their thin-soled leather loafers.” And a diary, left behind, brims with revelations of vulnerability nearly as great as Pavlić’s own.

But Call It in the Air records more than a relationship between brother and sister, more than a moment of personal loss. “I sit while eleven bodies of mine fall all over the countless mysteries of who you are,” he writes, while “Somewhere along the way, heat blasting past us & out the open jeep, the mountain sky turned to black steel & swung open its empty mouth.” In moments like these, Pavlić recognizes something of his big sister everywhere.

Rived by loss and ravaged by grief, Call It in the Air mingles the voices of brother and sister, one falling and one forgiven, to offer an intimate elegy that meditates on love itself.  

In a careful examination of personal and collective histories, David Keplinger’s Ice indexes the findings from memory’s slow melt—stories and faces we’ve forgotten, bones hidden in frost.

“I am asking how much more / I have to learn from this,” Keplinger writes. “You are asking that same question.” In these poems, he turns to our predecessors for guidance in picking apart the forces that govern modernity—masculinity, power, knowledge, conquest. Cryptic visitants arrive in the form of Gilgamesh, “searching for a way to stay in pain forever”; a grandmother mending socks, “her face in the dark unchanging”; Emily Dickinson, lingering at her window; a lion cub, asleep in ice for millennia.

With each comes a critique of the Anthropocene, our drive to possess the unpossessable. With each comes also the discovery of what—and who—we’ve harmed in the discovering. Ice shelves collapse. Climate change melts layers of permafrost to reveal a severed wolf’s head. A pair of grease-smudged reading glasses calls up a mother’s phantom. “I am sorry / for the parts you gave me / that I’ve misshapen,” Keplinger writes.

So is there “a point to all this singing”? Our ancestors cannot answer. The wolf’s head can’t, either. But sometimes, “out of the snow of confusion,” something answers, “saying gorgeous things like yes.” And the flowers “open up / their small green trumpets anyway.”

An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from National Book Critics Circle Award winner, National Book Award finalist and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.

“I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers,” writes Limón. “I am the hurting kind.” What does it mean to be the hurting kind? To be sensitive not only to the world’s pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world? To divine the relationships between us all? To perceive ourselves in other beings—and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they “do not / care to be seen as symbols”?

With Limón’s remarkable ability to trace thought, The Hurting Kind explores those questions—incorporating others’ stories and ways of knowing, making surprising turns, and always reaching a place of startling insight. These poems slip through the seasons, teeming with horses and kingfishers and the gleaming eyes of fish. And they honor parents, stepparents, and grandparents: the sacrifices made, the separate lives lived, the tendernesses extended to a hurting child; the abundance, in retrospect, of having two families.

Along the way, we glimpse loss. There are flashes of the pandemic, ghosts whose presence manifests in unexpected memories and the mysterious behavior of pets left behind. But The Hurting Kind is filled, above all, with connection and the delight of being in the world. “Slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still / green in the morning’s shade,” writes Limón of a groundhog in her garden, “she is doing what she can to survive.”

Finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work

Ama Codjoe’s highly anticipated debut collection brings generous light to the inner dialogues of women as they bathe, create art, make and lose love. Each poem rises with the urgency of a fully awakened sensual life.

Codjoe’s poems explore how the archetype of the artist complicates the typical expectations of women: be gazed upon, be silent, be selfless, reproduce. Dialoguing with and through art, Bluest Nude considers alternative ways of holding and constructing the self. From Lorna Simpson to Gwendolyn Brooks to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, contemporary and ancestral artists populate Bluest Nude in a choreography of Codjoe’s making. Precise and halting, this finely wrought, riveting collection is marked by an acute rendering of highly charged emotional spaces.

Purposefully shifting between the role of artist and subject, seer and seen, Codjoe’s poems ask what the act of looking does to a person—public looking, private looking, and that most intimate, singular spectacle of looking at one’s self. What does it mean to see while being seen? In poems that illuminate the tension between the possibilities of openness and and its impediments, Bluest Nude offers vulnerability as a medium to be immersed in and, ultimately, shared as a kind of power: “There are as many walls inside me / as there are bones at the bottom of the sea,” Codjoe writes in the masterful titular poem. “I want to be seen clearly or not at all.”

“The end of the world has ended,” Codjoe’s speaker announces, “and desire is still / all I crave.”

Startling and seductive in equal measure, this formally ambitious collection represents a powerful, luminous beginning.

An NPR Best Book of the Year
Winner of the CLMP Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction

“The Quickening is a book of hope.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky

An astonishing, vital work about Antarctica, climate change, and community.

In 2019, fifty-seven scientists and crew set out onboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer. Their destination: the ominous Thwaites Glacier at Antarctica’s western edge. Their goal: to learn as much as possible about this mysterious place, never before visited by humans. And with them is author Elizabeth Rush, who seeks, among other things, the elusive voice of the ice.

Rush shares her story of a groundbreaking voyage punctuated by both the sublime—the tangible consequences of our melting icecaps; the staggering waves of the Drake Passage; the torqued, unfamiliar contours of Thwaites—and the everyday moments of living and working in community. A ping-pong tournament at sea. Long hours in the lab. All the effort that goes into caring for the human and more-than-human worlds. Along the way, Rush takes readers on a personal journey around a more intimate question: What does it mean to create and celebrate life in a time of radical planetary change?

What emerges is a new kind of Antarctica story, one preoccupied not with flag planting and heroism but with the collective and challenging work of imagining a better future. With understanding the language of a continent where humans have only been present for two centuries. With the contributions and concerns of women, who were largely excluded from voyages until the last few decades, and of crew members of color, whose labor has often gone unrecognized. Urgent, brave, and vulnerable, The Quickening is an absorbing account of hope from one of our most celebrated and treasured contemporary authors.

In language that is both bracingly new and embracingly intimate, Emerson invites us to “dive down to the beautiful muck that helps you get that the world was made from the garbage at the bottom of the universe that was boiling over with joy that wanted to become you you you yes yes yes.” These poems are encounters—animal, vegetal, elemental—that form the markings of an irresistible future. And The Kissing of Kissing makes joyously clear how this future, which can sometimes seem light-years away, is actually as close, as near, as each immersive now. It finds breath in the woods and the words and the worlds we share, together “becoming burst becoming / the waking dream.”

With this book, Emerson, a nonspeaking autistic poet, generously invites you, the reader, to meet yourself anew, again, “to bring your beautiful nothing” into the light.