Milkweed Editions

Winner of the inaugural Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, North American Stadiums is an assured debut collection about grace—the places we search for it, and the disjunction between what we seek and where we arrive.

“You were supposed to find God here / the signs said.” In these poems, hinterlands demand our close attention; overlooked places of industry become sites for pilgrimage; and history large and small—of a city, of a family, of a shirt—is unearthed. Here is a factory emptying for the day, a snowy road just past border patrol, a baseball game at dusk. Mile signs point us toward Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Salt Lake City, Chicago. And god is not the God expected, but the still moment amid movement: a field “lit like the heart / of the night,” black stars stitched to the yellow sweatshirts of men in a crowd.

A map “bleached / pale by time and weather,” North American Stadiums is a collection at once resolutely unsentimental yet deeply tender, illuminating the historical forces that shape the places we inhabit and how those places, in turn, shape us.

A KIRKUS BEST BOOK OF 2018

In 2012, Sarah Ruhl was a distinguished author and playwright, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Max Ritvo, a student in her playwriting class at Yale University, was an exuberant, opinionated, and highly gifted poet. He was also in remission from pediatric cancer.

Over the next four years—in which Ritvo’s illness returned and his health declined, even as his productivity bloomed—the two exchanged letters that spark with urgency, humor, and the desire for connection. Reincarnation, books, the afterlife as an Amtrak quiet car, good soup: in Ruhl and Ritvo’s exchanges, all ideas are fair, nourishing game, shared and debated in a spirit of generosity and love. “We’ll always know one another forever, however long ever is,” Ritvo writes. “And that’s all I want—is to know you forever.”

Studded with poems and songs, Letters from Max is a deeply moving portrait of a friendship, and a shimmering exploration of love, art, mortality, and the afterlife.

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

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

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

Issue 27 is particularly international—even for Copper Nickel—and features an expansive folio of younger and less-established Irish and UK poets, including Irish poets Martin Dyar, Elaine Feeney, Victoria Kennefick, Conor O'Callaghan, Paul Perry, Stephen Sexton, Lorna Shaughnessy, and Jessica Traynor; and UK poets James Byrne, Vahni Capildeo, Manuela Moser, Sam Riviere, Zoë Brigley Thompson, and Chrissy Williams. The oldest poet in the folio was born in 1968; the youngest poets were born in the 1990s.

Issue 27 also features three translation folios (which are a regular feature in Copper Nickel): (1) a group of five prose poems by Danish poet Carsten Rene Nielsen (b. 1966), translated and introduced by David Keplinger; (2) three longer poems by Mexican poet Cristina Rivera Garza (b. 1964), translated by Julia Leverone; and (3) four poems by Mauritian poet Khal Torabully (b. 1956), translated and introduced by Nancy Naomi Carlson.

This issue also includes fiction by Farah Ali, Amy Stuber, Jyotsna Sreenivasan, and Jacinda Townsend.

Nonfiction includes a personal essay on Günter Grass by poet and German translator Stuart Friebert, a lyric essay on hexes by Laughlin award winner Kathryn Nuernberger, and a lyric essay on hide-and-seek by Ira Sukrungruang. Poets in issue 27 include two-time Pushcart Prize winner T. R. Hummer, NEA Fellow Christopher Kempf, Kingsley Tufts Award winner John Koethe, Whitman Award winner Emily Skaja, Best American Poetry contributor Corey Van Landingham, Jenny Boychuk, Juan Morales, Paul Otremba, Paige Quiñones, Arthur Russell, Francis Santana, and Chelsea Wagenaar.

The cover features work by Denver-based photographer Kristen Hatgi Sink.

“My sister is pregnant with a Lemon this week, Week 14, and this is amusing. My mother's uterine tumor, the size of a cabbage, is Week 30, and this is terrifying.”

When her mother is diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, Karen Babine—a cook, collector of thrifted vintage cast iron, and fiercely devoted daughter, sister, and aunt—can’t help but wonder: feed a fever, starve a cold, but what do we do for cancer? And so she commits herself to preparing her mother anything she will eat, a vegetarian diving headfirst into the unfamiliar world of bone broth and pot roast.

In these essays, Babine ponders the intimate connections between food, family, and illness. What draws us toward food metaphors to describe disease? What is the power of language, of naming, in a medical culture where patients are too often made invisible? How do we seek meaning where none is to be found—and can we create it from scratch? And how, Babine asks as she bakes cookies with her small niece and nephew, does a family create its own food culture across generations?

Generous and bittersweet, All the Wild Hungers is an affecting chronicle of one family’s experience of illness and of a writer's culinary attempt to make sense of the inexplicable.

Midway through the journey of his life, Dan Beachy-Quick found himself without a path, unsure how to live well. Of Silence and Song follows him through the forest of his experience, on a classical search for meaning in the world and in his particular, quiet life.

In essays, fragments, marginalia, images, travel writing, and poetry, Beachy-Quick traces relationships and the identities through which he sees the world. As father and husband. As teacher and student. As citizen and scholar. And as poet and reader, wondering at the potential and limits of literature, and guided by his studies in ancient Greek.

Of Silence and Song finds its inferno—and its paradise—in moments both historically vast and nakedly intimate. Our world’s disappearing bees, James Eagan Holmes, Columbine, and the persistent, unforgivable crime of slavery—these are the circles of hell Beachy-Quick wanders, but cannot escape. And yet he encounters redemption in the art of Marcel Duchamp, the pressed flowers in Emily Dickinson’s Bible, and long walks with his youngest daughter, Iris. “The litany in hell is weeping, weeping,” he writes, “but there are other litanies.”

Curious, earnest, and masterful, Of Silence and Song is an unforgettable exploration of the human soul.

“A full-bodied literary achievement bustling with sweat, regret, and sound.” —KIESE LAYMON

Ndiya Grayson returns to her childhood home of Chicago as a young professional, but even her high-end job in a law office can’t protect her from half-repressed memories of childhood trauma. One evening, vulnerable and emotionally disarrayed, she goes out and meets her equal and opposite:

Shame Luther, a no-nonsense construction worker by day and a self-taught piano player by night. The love story that ensues propels them on an unforgettable journey from Chicago’s South Side to the coast of Kenya as they navigate the turbulence of long-buried pasts and an uncertain future.

A stirring novel tuned to the clash between soul music’s vision of our essential responsibility to each other and a world that breaks us down and tears us apart, Another Kind of Madness is an indelible tale of human connection.

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD

FINALIST FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD

From U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón comes The Carrying—her most powerful collection yet.

Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility—“What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?”—and a body seized by pain and vertigo as well as ecstasy. A nation convulses: “Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal.” And still Limón shows us, as ever, the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying fullness of our too-short lives. “Fine then, / I’ll take it,” she writes. “I’ll take it all.”

In Bright Dead Things, Limón showed us a heart “giant with power, heavy with blood”—“the huge beating genius machine / that thinks, no, it knows, / it’s going to come in first.” In her follow-up collection, that heart is on full display—even as The Carrying continues further and deeper into the bloodstream, following the hard-won truth of what it means to live in an imperfect world.

“Even present tense has some of the grace of past tense, / what with all the present tense left to go.” From Max Ritvo—selected and edited by Louise Glück—comes a final collection of poems fully inscribed with the daring of his acrobatic mind and the force of his unrelenting spirit.

Diagnosed with terminal cancer at sixteen, Ritvo spent the next decade of his life pursuing poetry with frenetic energy, culminating in the publication of Four Reincarnations. As with his debut, The Final Voicemails brushes up against the pain, fear, and isolation that accompany a long illness, but with all the creative force of an artist in full command of his craft and the teeming affection of a human utterly in love with the world.

The representation of the end of life resists simplicity here. It is physical decay, but it is also tedium. It is alchemy, “the breaking apart, / the replacement of who, when, how, and where, / with what.” It is an antagonist—and it is a part of the self. Ritvo’s poems ring with considered reflection about the enduring final question, while suggesting—in their vibrancy and their humor—that death is not merely an end.

The Final Voicemails is an ecstatic, hopeful, painful—and completely breathtaking—second collection.

Here is Connemara, experienced at a walker’s pace. From cartographer Tim Robinson comes the second title in the Seedbank series, a breathtakingly intimate exploration of one beloved place’s geography, ecology, and history.

We begin with the earth right in front of his boots, as Robinson unveils swaths of fiontarnach—fall leaf decay. We peer from the edge of the cliff where Robinson’s house stands on rickety stilts. We closely examine an overgrown patch of heather, a flush of sphagnum moss. And so, footstep by footstep, moment by moment, Robinson takes readers deep into this storied Irish landscape, from the “quibbling, contentious terrain” of Bogland to the shorelines of Inis Ní to the towering peaks of Twelve Pins.

Just as wild and essential as the countryside itself are its colorful characters, friends and legends and neighbors alike: a skeletal, story-filled sheep farmer; an engineer who builds bridges, both physical and metaphorical; a playboy prince and cricket champion; and an enterprising botanist who meets an unexpected demise. Within a landscape lie all other things, and Robinson rejoices in the universal magic of becoming one with such a place, joining with “[t]he sound of the past, the language we breathe, and our frontage onto the natural world.”

Situated at the intersection of mapmaking and mythmaking, Listening to the Wind is at once learned and intimate, elegiac and magnificent—an exceptionally rich “book about one place which is also about the whole world” (Robert Macfarlane).

Excitement is rare in the small town of Marumaru, New Zealand. So when a young Maori man arrives on the morning train one day in 1903—announcing the imminent visit of a famous strongman—the entire town turns out to greet him, save one.

Colton Kemp, a department store window-dresser, is at home, watching his beloved wife die in premature childbirth. Tormented by grief, he hatches a plan to make his name and thwart his rival, the silent and gifted Carpenter: over the next sixteen years he will raise his newborn twins in secrecy and isolation, to become human mannequins in the world’s most lifelike window display.

From this moment of calamity emerges a work of masterful storytelling, at once wildly entertaining and formally ambitious. The novel leaps fearlessly from the epistolary to the castaway narrative to the picaresque, as Kemp’s plot goes awry and as he, his children, and the Carpenter converge in the New Zealand hinterland.

The Mannequin Makers is an adventure-filled and thoroughly delightful yarn, introducing Craig Cliff, one of international literature’s most promising young talents, to American audiences.

FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE IN GENERAL NONFICTION

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL OUTDOOR BOOK AWARD

Hailed as “deeply felt” (New York Times), “a revelation” (Pacific Standard), and “the book on climate change and sea levels that was missing” (Chicago Tribune), Rising is both a highly original work of lyric reportage and a haunting meditation on how to let go of the places we love.

With every passing day, and every record-breaking hurricane, it grows clearer that climate change is neither imagined nor distant—and that rising seas are transforming the coastline of the United States in irrevocable ways. In Rising, Elizabeth Rush guides readers through some of the places where this change has been most dramatic, from the Gulf Coast to Miami, and from New York City to the Bay Area. For many of the plants, animals, and humans in these places, the options are stark: retreat or perish in place.

Weaving firsthand testimonials from those facing this choice—a Staten Islander who lost her father during Sandy, the remaining holdouts of a Native American community on a drowning Isle de Jean Charles, a neighborhood in Pensacola settled by escaped slaves hundreds of years ago—with profiles of wildlife biologists, activists, and other members of these vulnerable communities, Rising privileges the voices of those too often kept at the margins.

In a new afterword for the paperback edition, Rush highlights questions of storytelling, adaptability, and how to powerfully shift conversation around ongoing climate change—including the storms of 2017 and 2018: Hurricanes Harvey, Maria, Irma, Florence, and Michael.

FINALIST FOR THE 2019 MINNESOTA BOOK AWARD IN POETRY

“After the explosion: the longest night.”

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

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

A multicultural anthology, edited by Susan O’Connor and Annick Smith, about the enduring importance and shifting associations of the hearth in our world.

A hearth is many things: a place for solitude; a source of identity; something we make and share with others; a history of ourselves and our homes. It is the fixed center we return to. It is just as intrinsically portable. It is, in short, the perfect metaphor for what we seek in these complex and contradictory times—set in flux by climate change, mass immigration, the refugee crisis, and the dislocating effects of technology.

Featuring original contributions from some of our most cherished voices—including Terry Tempest Williams, Bill McKibben, Pico Iyer, Natasha Trethewey, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Chigozie Obioma—Hearth suggests that empathy and storytelling hold the power to unite us when we have wandered alone for too long. This is an essential anthology that challenges us to redefine home and hearth: as a place to welcome strangers, to be generous, to care for the world beyond one’s own experience.

Written especially for families (with children ages 9 and up), this collection of stories, poems, and essays explores what makes the Gulf Coast region distinct, both culturally and environmentally.

Four sections cover adventures (scalloping and hurricanes, for example); great places (swamps, bayous, lakes, and beaches); reapers and sowers (from cotton farmers to berry pickers); and wild lives (focusing on alligators, egrets, manatees, and other creatures). Featuring Choctaw legends and songs from the cotton fields, this book evokes the literature, history, geography, ecology, and society of one of America’s treasured regions.

An exquisite and humane collection set to leave its mark on American poetics of the body and the body politic.

In Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance, Fady Joudah has written love poems to the lovely and unlovely, the loved and unloved. Here he celebrates moments of delight and awe with his wife, his mentors, his friends, and the beauty of the natural world. Yet he also finds tenderness for the other, the dead, and the disappeared, bringing together the language of medicine with the language of desire in images at once visceral and vulnerable. A symptomatic moon. A peach, quartered like a heart, and a heart, quartered like a peach. “I call the finding of certain things loss.”

Joudah is a translator between the heart and the mind, the flesh and the more-than-flesh, the word body and the world body—and between languages, with a polyglot’s hyperresonant sensibility. In “Sagittal Views,” the book’s middle section, Joudah collaborates with Golan Haji, a Kurdish Syrian writer, to foreground the imaginative act of constructing memory and history. Together they mark the place the past occupies in the body, the cut that “runs deeper than speech.”

Generous in its scope, inventive in its movements and syntax, Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance is a richly rewarding and indispensable collection.

Issue 26 of Copper Nickel features a diverse collection including translation “folios” of work by Norwegian poet Paal-Helge Gaugen, Franco-Algerian poet Samira Negrouche, and Austrian poet Elisabeth Schmeidel; poems by National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist Ada Limón, four-time Pushcart Prize winner Kevin Prufer, Yale Younger Poetry Series winner Fady Joudah, National Poetry Series winner Noah Eli Gordon, Canto Mundo fellow Rosebud Ben-Oni, NEA fellows James Hoch, Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Melissa Stein, Rockefeller Foundation fellow Robert Wrigley, Lambda Literary Award winner Maureen Seaton, as well as numerous emerging poets; fiction by Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award recipient Ladee Hubbard, Story Prize finalist Daphne Kalotay, as well as emerging writers Kaitlyn Andrews-Rice, Emily Chiles, and Gianni Skaragas; and nonfiction by NEA fellows Don Bogen and James Allen Hall, Kudiman Fellow Shamala Gallagher, Best American Essays contributor Matthew Vollmer, and newcomer Sari Boren.

The cover features work by Denver-based artist Rebecca Berlin.

FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE
FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

Selected by Fady Joudah as a winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series, Jos Charles’s revolutionary second collection of poetry, feeld, is a lyrical unraveling of the circuitry of gender and speech, defiantly making space for bodies that have been historically denied their own vocabulary. 

“i care so much abot the whord i cant reed.” In feeld, Charles stakes her claim on the language available to speak about trans experience, reckoning with the narratives that have come before by reclaiming the language of the past. In Charles’s electrifying transliteration of English—Chaucerian in affect, but revolutionary in effect—what is old is made new again. “gendre is not the tran organe / gendre is yes a hemorage.” “did u kno not a monthe goes bye / a tran i kno doesnt dye.” The world of feeld is our own, but off-kilter, distinctly queer—making visible what was formerly and forcefully hidden: trauma, liberation, strength, and joy. 

Urgent and vital, feeld composes a new narrative of what it means to live inside a marked body.

How can one reconcile the irreconcilable? In this masterful companion to Day Unto Day, Martha Collins finds common ground between contradictions—beauty and horror, joy and mortality, the personal and the political.

Like its predecessor, the daybook of Night Unto Night begins with time. Its six sequences, each written in one month a year, over the course of six years, bring together the natural and the all-too-human. Red-winged blackbirds and the death of a friend. The green leaves of a maple tree and drones overseas. A February spent in Italy and the persistence of anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Dissonance is a permanent state, Collins suggests, something to be occupied rather than solved. And so this collection approaches its transcendence in the space between these seeming contrasts—and in the space between stanzas, sequences, days, and months. These poems are powerfully alive, speaking to and revising each other, borrowing a word or a line before turning it on end. We are doomed to repeat mistakes, seasons, wars, words. Yet redemption beckons, too, in the persistence of empathy and love.

“Engaging and knowledgeably written.” —BULLETIN OF THE CENTER FOR CHILDREN’S BOOKS

After Cassie’s dad walks out, Cassie and her mom must make it on their own. While her mom waitresses at the local diner, Cassie takes care of the laundry and cooking after school. She has always wanted a dog, more than anything in the world, but her mother has always refused. Who would take care of a dog? Feed it? And, most importantly, pay for its food, supplies, and trips to the vet? But one day, Cassie’s dream cautiously sniffs its way into her yard—and into her life. Cassie decides this big dog will be her best friend, even if it means secretly getting a job to pay for the huge quantity of food he eats.

Quickly Cassie learns that Toklata, as she names her new friend, is a big responsibility—and that he may not be a sled dog at all but an Arctic wolf! The Dog with Golden Eyes is filled with fascinating facts about wolves and their behavior as well as some important lessons about responsibility.

WINNER OF THE UNT RILKE PRIZE

How does it feel to experience another city? To stand beneath tall buildings, among the countless faces of a crowd? To attempt to be heard above the din?

The poems of Another City travel inward and outward at once: into moments of self-reproach and grace, and to those of disassociation and belonging. From experiences defined by an urban landscape—a thwarted customer at the door of a shuttered bookstore in Crete, a chance encounter with a might-have-been lover in Copenhagen—to the streets themselves, where “an alley was a comma in the agony’s grammar,” in David Keplinger’s hands startling images collide and mingle like bodies on a busy thoroughfare.

Yet Another City deftly spans not only the physical space of global cities, but more intangible and intimate distances: between birth and death, father and son, past and present, metaphor and reality. In these poems, our entry into the world is when “the wound, called loneliness, / opens,” and our voyage out of it is through a foreign but not entirely unfamiliar constellations of cities: Cherbourg, Manila, Port-au-Prince.

This is a rich portrait of the seemingly incommunicable expanses between people, places, and ideas—and the ability of a poem to transcend the void. 

In The Mirrormaker, songwriter and poet Brian Laidlaw melds myths ancient and contemporary among the raspberries, wolves, and taconite mines of Minnesota’s Iron Range.

A companion volume to Laidlaw’s 2015 project, The Stuntman, this collection fuses the stories of two fabled couples: the mythical Narcissus and Echo, and Bob Dylan and Echo Star Helstrom, subject of the song “Girl from the North Country.” But where The Stuntman focused on Narcissus, The Mirrormaker takes its primary inspiration from Echo, drawing on ecocritical readings of American history and interrogating the masculine logic of resource extraction.

In these poems, Laidlaw explores themes of history and celebrity, love and longing, myth and meaning, in a landscape both ravaged and redemptive. He pits romantic obsession against self-obsession—“The first time I saw the moon / I thought it was my idea”—and asks whether a meaningful distinction can ever be drawn between the two. These themes are explored further in a companion song suite, written by Laidlaw and recorded with a longtime collaborator from the Iron Range, that accompanies this book via download.

Sharp, searching, and ecstatically musical, The Mirrormaker is a genre-expanding exploration of boom and bust—in mining economies and in young love.

Finalist for the Minnesota Book Award

A debut collection of poems that finds fertile ground in the unknown degree of intimacy, the mysterious and intense relationship, between siblings Georg and Grete Trakl.

Georg Trakl is one of the most celebrated poets of the early twentieth century. Less is known about his sister, Grete: also gifted, also addicted to drugs, and dead by her own hand three years after Georg’s overdose. But in Solve for Desire—selected by Srikanth Reddy as the winner of the 2017 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry—Caitlin Bailey summons Grete from the shadows. At once sensual and acidic, obsessive and bereft, the Grete of these poems is a fairy-tale sister leaving “missives dropped around the city, crumbs / for your ghost.”

Can one person be addicted to another? Can two souls be twinned, and where does that leave the physical? How do we solve for desire when the object we adore disappears—and how does the poet solve and resolve the past, its wounds and its absences? “Each time I write your name,” Bailey writes, “a key / turns somewhere in a lock.” Like the “perfect red burst” of poppies and of blood, these poems are a blooming, keening exploration of desire between brother and sister, poet and subject, the living and the dead.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 PEN TRANSLATION PRIZE

From celebrated Belgian author Geneviève Damas, a modern fable about friendship, self-determination, and the power of words.

Illiterate, isolated, and held at arm’s length by a bitter father, François Sorrente has spent his seventeen years within narrow confines. By day he tends the family farm’s pigs; by night he manages the household chores. Still, François can’t help but wonder about the wider world and his place in it. Who was his mother, who he remembers not at all? And why is the opposite shore of the river, where his beloved older sister disappeared many years ago, forbidden to him?

Propelled by curiosity, François turns to the eclectic denizens of his town to help make sense of these mysteries. He begins reading lessons with a melancholy curé, falls into an affair with a village woman, and affectionately confides his secrets to a velvet-eared piglet named Hyménée. As François questions both his origins and the course of his life, he begins to unlock the true story of his mother and sister, and comes to reinvent himself.

Exquisitely translated from the French by poet Jody Gladding, If You Cross the River is a magical debut.

Full of cryptic twists, philosophical quandaries, and fabulist turns, J. C. Hallman’s stories elucidate an intuitive understanding of the human condition.

An alienated young man discovers the meaning of love in the pages of the biology textbook The Conjugal Cyst, and in the arms of two increasingly unavailable older nurses. As his father deserts his mother, who is subsequently encroached upon by his eligible English teacher, an adolescent boy constructs a wicker man in the garage, to repel successors and to summon his own adult identity. A mother and son witness a father’s backyard fling with a disturbed neighbor who has pruned a leafy cave out of the dividing hedge. A young couple’s romantic consummation is repeatedly interrupted by the intrusion of a narrator commenting on the phenomenon of eroticism.

Richly allusive, these literate and literary stories explore modern riddles with no easy answers.

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

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

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

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

A KIRKUS BEST BOOK OF 2018

In 2012, Sarah Ruhl was a distinguished author and playwright, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Max Ritvo, a student in her playwriting class at Yale University, was an exuberant, opinionated, and highly gifted poet. He was also in remission from pediatric cancer.

Over the next four years—in which Ritvo’s illness returned and his health declined, even as his productivity bloomed—the two exchanged letters that spark with urgency, humor, and the desire for connection. Reincarnation, books, the afterlife as an Amtrak quiet car, good soup: in Ruhl and Ritvo’s exchanges, all ideas are fair, nourishing game, shared and debated in a spirit of generosity and love. “We’ll always know one another forever, however long ever is,” Ritvo writes. “And that’s all I want—is to know you forever.”

Studded with poems and songs, Letters from Max is a deeply moving portrait of a friendship, and a shimmering exploration of love, art, mortality, and the afterlife.

Since its establishment as a federally protected wilderness in 1964, the Boundary Waters has become one of our nation’s most valuable—and most frequently visited—natural treasures. When Amy and Dave Freeman learned of toxic mining proposed within the area’s watershed, they decided to take action—by spending a year in the wilderness, and sharing their experience through video, photos, and blogs with an audience of hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens.

This book tells the deeper story of their adventure in northern Minnesota: of loons whistling under a moonrise, of ice booming as it forms and cracks, of a moose and her calf swimming across a misty lake.

With the magic—and urgent—message that has rallied an international audience to the campaign to save the Boundary Waters, A Year in the Wilderness is a rousing cry of witness activism, and a stunning tribute to this singularly beautiful region.

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

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

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

From the author of You Must Remember This, an uncanny collection of poems that plumbs our capacity for cruelty and for wonder.

Who? A speaker at once questioner and questioned. An artist who embraces and resists what his work requires of him. “A naked / man in a crowd.”

What? Poems at once surreal and vulnerable, refusing to hide their uncomfortable truths behind their wildest imaginings.

Where? In the mind, where “Nobody fails at meditation / like I do.” Outside dreamlike cities. In the rich earth under a simple mattress. In new, disorienting fables and seemingly familiar folktales.

When? As a child, spurning his mother. As a young man, seeking wisdom and peace. And as an older man, looking back at what he once was.

Suffused in psychology, uncertainty, and desire, The Interrogation is a catechism of the self—or selves. Inside this collection’s hall of mirrors, faces double and multiply endlessly, and voices echo, laugh, and taunt. Why? these poems ask. Why does art demand sacrifice? Why does the heart want what it wants? And how do we escape loneliness?

The Interrogation is an accomplished collection, unsparingly honest, infused with yearning and laced with dark humor.

“Alex Lemon is a brave, headlong writer, and he captures the life of the body with vivid and memorable intensity.”—Mark Doty

Brain surgery. Assault weapons in the bed of a pickup truck. Sophia Loren at the Oscars. Rilke, Rodin, and the craters of the moon. Recovery and disintegration. Monkeys stealing an egg outside a temple in Kathmandu. Brushing teeth bloody on long car rides under blue skies. Pain, ours and what we bring to others. Wildfires in southern California. Rats in Texas. Childhood abuse. Dreams of tigers and blackout nights. The sweetness of mangoes. A son born into a shadowy hospital room. Love. Joy.

In Feverland, Alex Lemon has created a fragmented exploration of what it means to be a man in the tumult of twenty-first-century America—and a harrowing, associative memoir about how we live with the beauties and horrors of our pasts. How to move forward, Lemon asks, when trapped between the demons of one’s history and the angels of one’s better nature? How to live in kindness—to become a caring partner and parent—when one can muster very little such tenderness for oneself? How to be here, now? How to be here, good?

Immersed in darkness but shot through with light, Feverland is a thrillingly experimental memoir from one of our most heartfelt and inventive writers.

Poetry Finalist for the 2019 Writers' League of Texas Book Award

Over the course of four collections of poems, Alex Lemon has become known for his kinetic voice and sense of the dark absurd. Now this electrifying poet moves in a new direction—with a book-length sequence at once intensely vulnerable and thoroughly of our moment.

Populated by visions and ghosts, Another Last Day follows its speaker on a search through a natural landscape turned on its edge, the landscape of today’s America. In these poems, the moments of an ordinary day are rendered in raw, nearly hallucinatory detail: Ants drunk on cherry-red hummingbird nectar. An ambulance rushing into the distance. Endless rain. And, stranger: A dog carrying a hand in its mouth. An emergency room filled with moans. A place where reality and dreams merge, where “the dead refuse to be left / underground.”

When Lemon’s speaker invites us “behind my closed eyes,” it is into the vision of a speaker so plugged into the livingness of this world that he is tossed to the edge of living itself. And yet, in his poems, this openness is never just painful. “the world is a terrible place,” he writes, “but I want to last forever // clinging to its teeth.”

From celebrated poet Eric Pankey, a collection exploring the presence of the divine in the seemingly ordinary.

The ancient Romans practiced augury, reading omens in bird’s flight patterns. In the poems of Augury, revelation is found in nature’s smallest details: a lizard’s quick movements, a tree scarred by lighting, the white curve of a snail’s shell. Here the sensory world and the imagined one collide in unexpected and wonderful ways, as Pankey scrutinizes the physical for meaning, and that meaning for truth.

With uncommon grace, each of Pankey’s precise lyrics advances our shared ontological questions and expresses our deepest contradictions. In a world of mystery, should we focus on finding meaning or creating it? How can the known—and the unknown—be captured in language? “If one cannot see clearly,” Pankey writes, borrowing from Freud, “one at least wants / what is unclear to be in focus.”

Augury is a masterful and magical collection from a poet of stirring intelligence, “a book of stones unstitched from the wolf’s belly.”

"In me, there is the red of miry clay, the brown of spring floods, the gold of ripening tobacco. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored.” From these fertile soils of love, land, identity, family, and race emerges The Home Place, a big-hearted, unforgettable memoir by ornithologist and professor of ecology J. Drew Lanham.

Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina—a place "easy to pass by on the way somewhere else"—has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, readers meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be "the rare bird, the oddity.”

By turns angry, funny, elegiac, and heartbreaking, The Home Place is a remarkable meditation on nature and belonging, at once a deeply moving memoir and riveting exploration of the contradictions of black identity in the rural South—and in America today.

Issue 25 of Copper Nickel is aesthetically diverse, featuring translation “folios” by 12th century Chinese poet Li Qingzhao, Chilean Nobel Prize-winner Gabriela Mistral, and Iranian short story writer Payam Yazdanjoo; poetry by Dilruba Ahmed, Michael Bazzett, Talia Bloch, Graham Foust, John Gallaher, Tony Hoagland, Cynthia Hogue, Ashley Keyser, Sara Eliza Johnson, Peter LaBerge, Shara Lessley, Adrian C. Louis, Kevin Prufer, Elizabeth Scanlon, Analicia Sotelo, Juned Subhan, Ellen Doré Watson, Lesley Wheeler, &c.; fiction by Meagan Ciesla, Viet Dinh, Joel Morris, Joanna Pearson, and Pete Stevens; and nonfiction by Robert Archambeau, Alex McElroy, and Hasanthika Sirisena.

The cover of this issue features work by Denver-based painter and collagist Daisy Patton.

Selected for the National Poetry Series by Ada Limón, I Know Your Kind is a haunting, blistering debut collection about the American opioid epidemic and poverty in rural Appalachia.

In West Virginia, fatal overdoses on opioids have spiked to three times the national average. In these poems, Will Brewer demonstrates an immersive, devastating empathy for both the lost and the bereaved, the enabled and the enabler, the addict who knocks late at night and the brother who closes the door. He shows us the high, at once numbing and transcendent: “this warm moment when I forget which part of me / I blamed.” He shows us the overdose, when “the poppies on my arms / bruised red petals.” And he shows us the mourner, attending his high school reunion: “I guess we were underdressed: / me in my surf shoes / you in an urn.” Underneath and among this multiplicity of voices runs the Appalachian landscape—a location, like the experience of drug addiction itself, of stark contrasts: beauty and ruin, nature and industry, love and despair.

Uncanny, heartbreaking, and often surreal, I Know Your Kind is an unforgettable elegy for the people and places that have been lost to opioids.

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

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

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

“Simple, elegant, and enduring.” —KIRKUS

In The Country of Language, Sanders recalls the stories and experiences that have guided him as a writer, and speaks on behalf of a life rooted in the commonplace, in what is becoming paradoxically rare: a sense of “at-homeness” in the natural world. Emerging from his work is the conviction that moments of interaction with the nonhuman worldwhether one is transfixed in a silent stare down with a great blue heron or listening to the voice of a creek while bombs threaten far-off countries—restore the sanity and courage needed to address the griefs of the human community.

“In his usual articulate and well-crafted prose, Scott Russell Sanders continues to relate everyday and natural experiences to greater meanings. . . . His writing, he says, is his way of asking questions.” —Library Journal

A dual-language collection of vivid, tightly knit poems from one of the most important contemporary poets writing in German.

The Art of Topiary is the gorgeous product of a long collaboration between Jan Wagner and American poet David Keplinger. With the care of master gardeners tending their plants, Wagner and Keplinger have shaped Wagner’s originals—acclaimed internationally, now in English for the first time—into precise, delightful, and highly modern translations.

Along the way, the collection unfolds dialogues between discipline and freedom, sound and sense, faithfulness and improvisation. In these poems, formal structures are a corset loosened by each line of verse, a garden always pleasurably at risk of being overrun. Yet for all Wagner’s wit and sharp poetic detail, The Art of Topiary is written with an intimate earnest: a swarm of gnats take on an urgent mystery as they hum in code around the speaker’s ears, a bird atop a rhino’s leathery back becomes a fragile porcelain cup, and the antlers of an elk reach for the air like a champion for a trophy.

Compact, lightfooted, and curious, The Art of Topiary is the exciting American debut of a stunning and joyful voice in global literature.

“A first book of remarkable talent and depth.” —PATTIANN ROGERS

Like Atlas holding up the world, this collection elevates human history—acknowledging and transforming patterns of all kinds through careful attention.

In Atlas, Katrina Vandenberg captures the way events reverberate and repeat across time and place. In the seventeenth century in the Netherlands, as one poem notes, a virus fueled through the tulip trade, making the flowers’ veined petals so beautiful the price of bulbs soared; in the twentieth century in the United States, blood tainted with the AIDS virus was inadvertently transfused into the veins of hemophiliacs, eclipsing “the purpose that briefly lit their brilliant veins.” In another poem, Vandenberg links an image of her sister, pausing in her work as housekeeper, with the contours of a maid in a Vermeer painting and a woman just “made over” on that day’s episode of Oprah.

Like any good atlas, this collection plots intersections: of love, death, history, art, and desire. Carrying lines and themes from one poem to the next, drawing on family artifacts, memory, and imagination, these are poems that build a conversation.

When acclaimed author Deni Béchard first learned of the last living bonobos—matriarchal great apes that are, alongside the chimpanzee, our closest relatives in the animal kingdom—he was completely astonished. How could the world possibly accept the extinction of this majestic species?

Béchard discovered one relatively small NGO, the Bonobo Conservation Initiative (BCI), which has done more to save bonobos than many far larger organizations. Based on the author’s extensive travels in the Congo and Rwanda, this book explores BCI's success, offering a powerful, truly postcolonial model of conservation. In contrast to other traditional conservation groups Béchard finds, BCI works closely with Congolese communities, addressing the underlying problems of poverty and unemployment, which lead to the hunting of bonobos. By creating jobs and building schools, they gradually change the conditions that lead to the eradication of the bonobos.

This struggle is far from easy. Devastated by the worst military conflict since World War II, the Congo and its forests continue to be destroyed by aggressive logging and mining. Béchard's fascinating and moving account—filled with portraits of the extraordinary individuals and communities who make it all happen offers a rich example of how international conservation must be reinvented before it's too late.

Since its establishment as a federally protected wilderness in 1964, the Boundary Waters has become one of our nation’s most valuable—and most frequently visited—natural treasures. When Amy and Dave Freeman learned of toxic mining proposed within the area’s watershed, they decided to take action—by spending a year in the wilderness, and sharing their experience through video, photos, and blogs with an audience of hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens.

This book tells the deeper story of their adventure in northern Minnesota: of loons whistling under a moonrise, of ice booming as it forms and cracks, of a moose and her calf swimming across a misty lake.

With the magic—and urgent—message that has rallied an international audience to the campaign to save the Boundary Waters, A Year in the Wilderness is a rousing cry of witness activism, and a stunning tribute to this singularly beautiful region.

Written in the third century, this is one of the earliest Chinese works about the use of language, preceded only by the Ta Hsueh (Great Learning) of Confucius. Written by Lu Chi, a soldier-poet, the Wen Fu, or The Art of Writing (wen means “art”; fu is a poetic form), is intended for those who wish to engage the art of letters at its deepest levels.

In sixteen sections, The Art of Writing discusses the joys and problems that face both writer and reader and provides basic insights about many techniques of writing.

Beautifully and faithfully translated by award-winning poet, essayist, and Chinese scholar Sam Hamill, The Art of Writing deserves a place on every writer’s reference table.

It's 1942, just a month after the United States entered World War II. Lark, her mother Arlene, and Aunt Betty are in a station changing trains, leaving their lives in Harvester, Minnesota behind, and waiting for the train going to Los Angeles. Young men—soldiers—swarm the platform, heading off to war.

Against this dramatic backdrop, Gardenias revisits Faith Sullivan’s most beloved characters from The Cape Ann, taking them from their hometown to new lives, new dreams, and new risks. Arlene has left her husband behind after he gambled away the money she'd saved to finally build the Cape Ann house of her and Lark's Depression-era dreams. As a new life takes shape in San Diego in a wartime housing project full of neighbors they know little about, Lark wonders, as does the reader, if a dream means losing everything of value or finally finding it.

Follow the humorous chronicles of Faredoon—known as Freddy— Junglewalla on his rise to success as he attempts to assassinate his insidious mother-in-law, prevent his son from becoming a holy beggar, and cope with a variety of traumas. 

At the dawn of the twentieth century in Pakistan, Freddy Junglewalla moves his family — pregnant wife, baby daughter, and Jerbanoo, his rotund mother-in-law — from their ancestral forest home to cosmopolitan Lahore. He opens a store, and as his fortunes grow, so does the animosity between Freddy and his mother-in-law. While Freddy prospers under British rule, life with the domineering Jerbanoo is another matter entirely.

This exuberant novel, full of rollicking humor, paints a vivid picture of life in the Parsee community.

Since Milkweed Editions’ original publication of The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty, Marilyn Chin has been widely celebrated as a consummate poet of the hybrid experience. At once ancient and contemporary, personal and political, grounded and yet uniquely dazzling, this extraordinary collection blends Asian and Western sensibilities in a pioneering way.

Here, with wit and energy, Chin defines her existence as a first-generation Asian American woman, effectively straddling two cultures. And she spins virtuoso jazz in her juxtaposition of the contemporary with images and metaphors from Chinese tales and classic poems, creating an expansive poetry of self.

Featuring an afterword by the author addressing the collection’s effect and the developments in her work since, this edition reintroduces a modern classic to a new generation of readers.

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

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

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

“When a poet spills her secrets, that’s a special gift.” —KIRKUS 

An award-winning poet, a mother, a lover of the land and every creature in it, as well as a student of zoology, the author is at home in the vocabulary of nature. In this work of prose punctuated and intensified by poetry, she describes the genesis of her most admired verse and reveals how and why she writes.

“When a poet spills her secrets, that’s a special gift. . . . Pattiann Rogers seeks to situate, in plain words, the genesis of her poetry, an experience she handles with aplomb even while it lays her open. . . . Much of Rogers’s poetry has fixed on natural history and notions of place, giving praise to creature and landscape, deciphering how she will act honorably with them without sermonizing or sanitizing.” —Kirkus 

“Pattiann Rogers deservedly receives plaudits for [her] luminous writing. . . . Rogers is a multi-talented, national treasure.” —Eugene Weekly

“A trained zoologist, Pattiann Rogers brings a scientist’s eye to her poetry, often with startlingly beautiful results. As she creates a poem, she says, the poem also creates her. Rogers’s prose flows in and out of the poems, making the book a gentle primer not only on reading her poetry but on reading poetry in general.” —Library Journal

From the memories of a childhood marked by extreme poverty, mental illness, and restrictive fundamentalist Christian rules, Janisse Ray crafted a “heartfelt and refreshing” (New York Times) memoir that has inspired thousands to embrace their beginnings, no matter how humble, and to fight for the places they love. This new edition updates and contextualizes the story for a new generation and a wider audience desperately searching for stories of empowerment and hope.

Ray grew up in a junkyard along U.S. Highway 1, hidden from Florida-bound travelers by hulks of old cars. In language at once colloquial, elegiac, and informative, Ray redeems her home and her people, while also cataloging the source of her childhood hope: the Edenic longleaf pine forests, where orchids grow amid wiregrass at the feet of widely spaced, lofty trees. Today, the forests exist in fragments, cherished and threatened, and the South of her youth is gradually being overtaken by golf courses and suburban development.

A contemporary classic, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood is a clarion call to protect the cultures and ecologies of every childhood.

“Aquaboogie is a love story in fragments . . . A book by a writer whose love for her characters infuses her work with the dignity and urgency they so clearly deserve.” —The New York Times Book Review

Full of defiance and tenderness, Aquaboogie chronicles the triumphs and tragedies of the residents of Rio Seco. In “Aquaboogie,” art student Nacho finances his class out East by working as a janitor, subject to torment by his white coworkers. In “Back,” elderly Pashion sleeps wrapped around the body of her dying husband L. C., all the while recalling their 49 years of marriage and thinking about the sleeping pills she has secreted away for when life becomes unbearable. In “The Box,” Shawan carries her radio everywhere; since her best friend was gunned down, music is the only thing that can get her through the day. In these and other stories in this powerful collection, the author gives voice to those on the margins while demonstrating her great affection for her characters.

“Short, sharp, devastating, The Farther Shore is a literary machine gun . . . a winning debut that happens to be a war novel.” —Kansas City Star

A small unit of soldiers from the US Army is separated from their command and left for dead. Their only option is to keep moving, in hope that they’ll escape the marauding gangs and clansmen who appear to rule the city. Josh, a young soldier, and his “battle buddies” are left to wander in this hostile territory. A series of nightmarish, often violent encounters leaves only a few of them alive. The Farther Shore is a short, stark war novel in which the characters are both haunting and inhuman, natives and invaders alike. The emerging story reflects a new kind of military engagement, with all the attendant horrors and difficulties of fighting in a strange new postmodern battlefield. In his unforgettable debut novel, Matthew Eck puts readers inside the mind of a confused young soldier caught in the fog of unexpected warfare.

“Bold, profane, hallucinatory.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Haunting . . . goes beyond the on-the-ground chaos of battle to capture the physical and psychological disorientation of modern war.” —Publishers Weekly

“Every word in Eck’s first novel is as solid as a stone. Every moment of crisis feels authentic in its terror and tragedy; indeed, Eck served as a soldier in Somalia at age eighteen. Heir to Hemingway, and damn near as powerful as Cormac McCarthy in The Road, Eck has created a contemporary version of The Red Badge of Courage in this tale of one young man’s trial by fire in the pandemonium of war in an age of high-tech weaponry and low-grade morality.” —Booklist (starred review)

“The first great war novel of our generation.” —Salon

The acclaimed short story and novella collection by “a virtuoso of the dismal comedy of Soviet life”—and the basis for the HBO film PU-239 (The New York Times). A PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist. 

Ken Kalfus traverses a century of Russian history in tales that range from hair-raising to comic to fabulous. The astonishing title story follows a doomed nuclear power plant worker as he attempts to hawk plutonium in Moscow’s black market. In “Budyonnovsk,” a young man hopes that the takeover of his town by Chechen rebels will somehow save his marriage. "Salt" is an economic fairy tale, featuring kings, princesses, and swiftly melting currencies. 

Set in the 1920s, “Birobidzhan” is the bittersweet story of a Jewish couple journeying to the Soviet Far East, where they intend to establish the modern world’s first Jewish state. The novella, “Peredelkino,” which closes the book, traces the fortunes of a 1960s literary apparatchik whose romantic intrigues inadvertently become political.

Together, these works of fiction capture the famously enigmatic Russian psyche. They display Kalfus’ ability to imagine a variety of believable yet wholly singular characters whose lives percolate against a backdrop of momentous events.

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

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

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

A moving story of building hope, inspired by the true story of Estrella Children’s Park in central Los Angeles, where kids created the destination they dreamed of.

Having no place to play in their run-down inner city neighborhood, twelve-year-old Arturo and the other kids in his sixth-grade class decide to turn a vacant lot into a playground. At first Arturo thinks his idea might be foolish. Not only do his brother and the other gang members in Los Vatos Locos make fun of him, but even school officials are skeptical of the plan. With their somewhat loopy teacher’s help, however, the kids begin to build community support for the park.

No Place offers inspiration for children—along with good advice about how to take an idea and make it a reality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But hell, I do like to write letters. Much easier than writing books.”

And write letters Edward Abbey—“the Thoreau of the American West” (Washington Post)—did. At once incendiary and insightful, cantankerous and profoundly perceptive, Abbey was a singular American writer and cult hero, as famous for books like Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang as he was infamous for the persona of “Cactus Ed.” A true iconoclast with a rich sense of humor, his polemics and salvos—Wallace Stegner once likened Abbey to the “stinger of a scorpion”—were not limited to any one arena.

Abbey’s postcards and letters, legendary during his lifetime, convey the fullness of the man and reveal, along with his wisdom and savage wit, a tender side seldom seen before. For readers new to Abbey, this collection is an awe-inspiring introduction to the man and his works. And for devoted fans, the letters chronicle his evolution as an authentic American voice in the wilderness.

“The essential feature of the prairie is its horizon, which you can neither walk to nor touch.”

When there is no summit to reach nor farther shore to attain­­—only a constantly receding point between earth and sky to follow—a journey proceeds as much into one’s own mind as it does into the natural world. Sauntering through the tall grasses of the prairie, Paul Gruchow engages in just such a boundless journey, exploring simultaneously the subtle beauty of the Great Plains and the mind’s astonishment as such grandeur.

Charting one cycle of seasons, Journal of a Prairie Year reveals countless cycles of thought: the innumerable sounds of winter snow beg us to understand its song; the fecundity of spring questions the accuracy of naming its abundance; the tenacity of prairie roots in a summer drought contrast with the shallow roots of our culture; and the mortality of fall mirrors our steady destruction of a once seemingly infinite expanse.

The result is equal parts phenology and philosophy, a blend of natural and human history from a writer who “makes empty places full and a reader’s imagination soar” (Washington Post): calling us to remember a threatened world, and urging us to reach for its unmarred horizon.

At midlife, Mary Rose O’Reilley writes, we are called to an “archaeology of memory”—turning over a potsherd here, a fragment there—to assemble something whole out of the messiness of experience. Excavating her own life, she traces the middle-class Irish American background that shaped her, with its mix of antic humor, terror, and mysticism, and finds meaning in the seemingly smallest, most transient encounters.

But O’Reilley’s purpose is less to recount these moments than it is to find the language for a different kind of story, in which the narrative of daily life opens to admit the holy and its corollary, the comic. Encouraging all of us to contemplate our own deep story, she calls hers a demo-life, in which the facts of personal history ground a narrative of consciousness and perception.

Earthy and luminous, unconventional and profoundly illuminating, The Love of Impermanent Things offers a threshold ecology for readers of all ages.

The western mindset is arguably one of the greatest threats to the world’s ecological balance. Corporatism and globalization are two of the obvious villains here, but what part does human nature play in the problem?

Since its inception in 1982, Orion magazine has been a forum for looking beyond the effects of ecological crises to their root causes in human culture. Less an anthology than a vision statement, this timely collection challenges the division of human society from the natural world that has often characterized traditional environmentalism.

Edited and introduced by Barry Lopez, The Future of Nature encompasses such topics as local economies, the social dynamics of activism, America’s incarceration society, naturalism in higher education, developing nations, spiritual ecology, the military-industrial landscape, and the persistent tyranny of wilderness designation. Featuring the fine writing and insights for which Orion is famous, this book is required reading for anyone interested in a livable future for the planet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Nichols was raised by a family as American as the Stars and Stripes.

He enjoyed a top-notch private school education and at 23 wrote a best-selling novel, The Sterile Cuckoo. At that point, he considered himself “a child blessed by the culture and fated for delirious success.”

However, a trip to Guatemala derailed his golden-child existence and set him on a very different path toward social and environmental activism. This book charts Nichols’s rich and often tormented journey out of his sheltered middle-class life toward a belief in what he calls “liberation ecology.”

Thirteen-year-old Anna Kallio often thinks about the way life was before her mother died. Now responsible for running the house and caring for her younger brother, Matti, she has no time for school or playing with friends. And she worries about her father, who works in the dangerous iron mines.

When Anna and Matti realize how lonely their father is, they plot to find him a new wife, even trying to arrange a match with one of the “mail order” brides arriving from Finland. But the results are different from anything that Anna expected.

Set in 1907 in northern Minnesota’s iron-mining range, A Bride for Anna’s Papa is a vivid story of the courage it takes not only to survive but to enjoy life in a rugged frontier community.

Travelogue, cultural meditation, and love story, On the Ice casts a panoramic view on one of the oddest communities in one of the most extreme places on earth.

Negative 70-degree weather. Canned food that dates back at least a decade. Wind storms powerful enough to lift a human off the ground. Extremely unfashionable clothing. Welcome to Antarctica, the farthest-away place in the world.

Hoping to get away from the complexities of her life, Gretchen Legler arrives at McMurdo Station with the intention of researching the landscape; what she finds, instead, is a zany population of misfits and dreamers. Populated by people from all walks of life—bankers, MBAs, therapists, carpenters, scientists, laborers, and military brass—the individuals that Legler meets have gone to Antarctica to escape everything from parking tickets to angry spouses.

Part sociological study, part historiography, and part love story, On the Ice is an exploration of one of the most unexplored places on earth and the people who are drawn to it.

When Runt's mother dies, he’s sent to live with his older sister Helen, whom he hasn’t seen in years, not since she ran away. Avoiding the dreary trailer he now shares with Helen and her creepy boyfriend Cole, Runt spends his days rambling around his new town, especially the local cemetery. There he meets Mitch, a precocious boy in a wheelchair who’s battling cancer.

The two lonely boys become fast friends, but as their friendship deepens, each faces a powerful crisis. As Runt and Mitch struggle with the harsh realities of poverty, abuse, and illness, each looks to the other for comfort and courage. Then, Helen’s problems complicate things even further. Can Runt help them both, and himself, too?

The empathy, insight, and finely drawn characters seen in V. M. Caldwell’s first two novels are in full view in this moving story of a young boy’s attempts to create a better life for himself and those around him.

“Gruchow is an ideal guide to the BWCA.” —ISTHMUS BOOKS QUARTERLY

Organized by the seasons of the year, Boundary Waters explores the natural and soul-sustaining beauty of the largest roadless area east of the Rocky Mountains: the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, a vast network of forest and thousands of lakes, isolated and pristine, straddling the border between northern Minnesota and Ontario.

Throughout Boundary Waters, Paul Gruchow skis, backpacks, and canoes through the Boundary Waters and its environs, including Sea Gull Lake, Isle Royale National Park, the Grand Portage Trail, Quetico Provincial Park (Canada), and Voyageurs National Park. Drawing on the works of Thoreau and Wendell Berry, Gruchow turns his naturalist’s eye on this wilderness full of wolves, moose, and loons, contemplating the richness of our natural heritage and our need to share its treasures with others.

Boundary Waters is a testament to Gruchow’s magnificent ability to explores the relationship of person to place, illuminating not only our lands, but our souls.

Poet, musician, wit, and polemicist—Bill Holm is one of kind. A Minnesotan of Icelandic ancestry, his travels have taken him all over the world, providing material for a number of rich and memorable books.

In this, his most ambitious work to date—a book “as forceful, insightful, and lyrical as ever” (Los Angeles Times)—Holm travels to Brimnes, his fisherman’s cottage on the shore of a fjord in northern Iceland. Looking west from this place of seemingly endless and kaleidoscopic light, and surrounded by little more than the sound of the sea and the birds beyond his windows, he considers America—“my home, my citizenship, my burden.”

In the tradition of Walt Whitman and Henry Thoreau, The Windows of Brimnes offers a singular perspective that is at once incisive and amusing, provocative and congenial.

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

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

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

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

From the screenwriter of the Oscar-nominated House of Sand and Fog, a fierce, elegant, page-turning novel about race, money, and the American Dream

***Finalist for the 2015 Los Angeles Times Book Prize***

Sins of Our Fathers follows small-town banker J.W., who has been caught embezzling funds to support his gambling addiction. J.W. is on the verge of losing everything when his boss offers him a scoundrel's path to redemption: sabotage a competing, Native banker named Johnny Eagle. 

A single father, Eagle recently returned to the reservation, leaving a high-powered job in the hope of simultaneously empowering his community and saving his troubled son. 

When J.W. moves onto the reservation and begins to work his way close to Eagle, hundreds of years of racial animosities rise to the surface, inexorably driving the characters toward a Shakespearean and shattering conclusion.

“My father’s ranch is now a testament to the fact that cattlemen and coyotes can live in peace,” Ann Daum writes. But it wasn’t always so. Reared on her father’s thirty-thousand-acre ranch, Daum grew up to become a rancher herself, raising sport horses. And in The Prairie in Her Eyes, she captures the beauty, despair, rewards, and loneliness of ranching in the modern West.

Daum’s essays rise and fall with the undulations of the prairie and can pack a punch like South Dakota weather. She writes about actual artifacts buried in the prairie soil, as well as of what lies hidden in the lives of people who live there and the “white line” you can never go beneath without drawing blood. Warm memories of her girlhood on the ranch turn cold as she recalls brutalities both casual and calculated—the writhing of a captive coyote, a ranch hand’s predatory sexuality, and the horrors of a chicken research facility.

Unflinching and understated, Daum breaks the silence that for too long has marked (and marred) the lives of western women. With humor and insight, her essays touch on different aspects of rural life and convey her vision for a good life in the west.

Lake Superior, the north country, the great fresh-water expanse. Frigid. Lethal. Wildly beautiful. The Long-Shining Waters gives us three stories whose characters are separated by centuries and circumstance, yet connected across time by a shared geography.

In 1622, Grey Rabbit—an Ojibwe woman, a mother and wife—struggles to understand a dream-life that has taken on fearful dimensions. As she and her family confront the hardship of living near the “big water,” her psyche and her world edge toward irreversible change. In 1902, Berit and Gunnar, a Norwegian fishing couple, also live on the lake. Berit is unable to conceive, and the lake anchors her isolated life, testing the limits of her endurance and spirit. And in 2000, when Nora, a seasoned bar owner, loses her job and is faced with an open-ended future, she is drawn reluctantly into a road trip around the great lake. As these narratives unfold and overlap with the mesmerizing rhythm of waves, a fourth mysterious character gradually comes into stark relief.

Rich in historical detail, and universal in its exploration of the human desire for meaning when faced with uncertainty, The Long-Shining Waters is an unforgettable and singular debut.

Titles and Awards:

MILKWEED NATIONAL FICTION PRIZE WINNER
INDIE HEARTLAND BESTSELLER
ONE BOOK SOUTH DAKOTA SELECTION
MINNESOTA BOOK AWARD FINALIST
MIDWEST BOOKSELLERS BOOK AWARD FINALIST

“Filled with nuggets of wisdom and provocative questions.” —ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS

Rick Bass’s dog, Colter, is the brown dog of the Yaak. Described by Bass as a creature almost mythic, the dog charges through the mountain valleys following the scent of game. In this book, Bass gives a history of his years with Colter—including vignettes about interactions with well-known writers Jim Harrison and Barry Lopez—as a way of understanding what is intuitive in himself and his quest to create art.

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

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

The author of the acclaimed Montana 1948 “spins charm and melancholy” in this novel of youth and romantic rivalry in 1960s rural Minnesota (Denver Post).

Willow Falls, Minnesota, 1962. The shooting of a young woman on Thanksgiving Day sets off a chain of unsettling events in the life of seventeen-year-old Matthew Garth. A close friend of the prosperous Dunbar family, Matthew is present in Dr. Dunbar’s home office when the victim is brought in. The sight of Louisa Lindahl—beautiful and mortally wounded—makes an indelible impression on the young man.

Fueled by his feverish desire for this mysterious woman and a deep longing for the comfort and affluence that appears to surround the Dunbars, Matthew finds himself drawn into a vortex of greed, manipulation, and ultimately betrayal. Larry Watson’s tale heart-breaking tale “resonates with language as clear and images as crisp as the spare, flat prairie of its Minnesota setting” (Kirkus Reviews).

An Esquire Best Book of 2011

It’s the summer of 1955 when thirteen-year-old George Harrington arrives in Obadiah, Alabama, to work in his grandmother’s store to save money for a motorcycle. Esther Garrison, who has just graduated from the eighth grade at Obadiah Colored School, also works at the store, saving money to attend high school in the fall. Her brother Bennett’s job is not as desirable as his sister’s—he works for a surly white farmer, Mr. Vorhise, who raises fighting dogs.

An unusual trio—George is white; Esther and Bennett are black—they spend their time roaming the countryside together, fishing and searching for outlaw treasure. On these excursions, conversation often turns to Esther and Bennett’s father, Staple, who mysteriously vanished four years ago. When George, Esther, and Bennett stumble onto chilling evidence that explains the mystery of Staple’s disappearance, a current of racism ruptures their idyllic summer and forces the three friends to confront the hate that surrounds them.

Well-crafted and poignant, The $66 Summer brings home both the horrible realities of the segregated South and the power of friendship.

Born and raised with the kind of expectations that often accompany privilege, Jim Lenfestey approached his thirtieth birthday in a state of acute anxiety. A young family and a demanding work life on one hand, and a burgeoning love for poetry on the other.

When an independent bookseller discerns Lenfestey’s difficulties, and prescribes for a remedy the poems of a Chinese hermit named Han Shan, Lenfestey’s life is changed forever. After “swallowing the poems like aspirin” for the next thirty years, a spirited embrace of this ancient poet called Cold Mountain—the poet he has come to see as a guiding light in his life—prompts Lenfestey to travel to China on a pilgrim’s search for his cave. Along the way, this quest takes our author first to Tokyo, where he visits with the foremost translator and scholar of eastern poetry, Burton Watson, and from there across China, from the enormous chanting hall of ten thousand Buddhas in Bailin Temple to the birthplace of Confucius.

A singular combination of travel writing, memoir, translation, and poetry, Seeking the Cave is both deeply personal and universally illuminating. “Uniting our brief literary life with the ancient richness of Chinese culture” (Robert Bly), this extraordinary book evokes the transformative power of poetry, and the way it breathes meaning into our lives.

At midlife, Mary Rose O’Reilley writes, we are called to an “archaeology of memory”—turning over a potsherd here, a fragment there—to assemble something whole out of the messiness of experience. Excavating her own life, she traces the middle-class Irish American background that shaped her, with its mix of antic humor, terror, and mysticism, and finds meaning in the seemingly smallest, most transient encounters.

But O’Reilley’s purpose is less to recount these moments than it is to find the language for a different kind of story, in which the narrative of daily life opens to admit the holy and its corollary, the comic. Encouraging all of us to contemplate our own deep story, she calls hers a demo-life, in which the facts of personal history ground a narrative of consciousness and perception.

Earthy and luminous, unconventional and profoundly illuminating, The Love of Impermanent Things offers a threshold ecology for readers of all ages.

Manz is sure of one thing: he lives on the wrong side of the tracks in dusty Rockhill, Texas. Life is tough for everyone—his hard-drinking mother, her truck-driving boyfriend, even his privileged friend Jed—but especially for Manz, the mixed-race son of migrant apple pickers. If he could only get out of town, his life would be better.

When the summer heat sets in, Manz and Jed take a job rebuilding fence for a cattle ranch outside town. There he meets Vanessa, who works in the ranch’s kitchen. The two hit it off, but Manz isn’t sure he can trust her. As the dog days drag on, Manz must negotiate an unwieldy terrain involving his unpredictable mother, a best friend whose father uses him as a punching bag, and a simmering, creeping delusion that “Operation Wetback”—which brutally relocated illegal aliens deep in Mexican territory following World War II—has been put back into effect. Manz’s bright and questioning mind begins to give in to its own claustrophobic temptations as he finds guidance in the voices that have been growing louder and more insistent each day.

A revealing look a one young man’s struggle with identity and the effects of schizophrenia.

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

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

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

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

Children learning to fish in the tidewaters of Chesapeake Bay, a girl escaping Ocean City to see her first American oystercatcher, a family canoeing through Okefenokee Swamp, brothers catching a trophy bass together—these are some of the vivid stories, contemporary and historical, in this multilayered portrait of the South Atlantic Coast.

Drawn from the environments of northern Vermont and the South of France, the poems in Rooms and Their Airs explore the interface of the human and natural worlds, further eroding that distinction with each poem.

The verse here merges subject and object, often giving voice to natural phenomena—a vernal pool, a fossil, a beam of light. These poems sparkle with humor, sophisticated word play, and intellectual examination, reflecting an elegant and contagious curiosity about history, language, and the world.

Linked poems give voice to garden vegetables while drawing inspiration from the archival illustrations in The Medieval Handbook. A mother and daughter’s trip to see France's cave paintings uncovers living vestiges in prehistoric depictions and reaffirms the enduring nature of art. With this collection, Jody Gladding cements her reputation as the literary heir to A. R. Ammons, Gustaf Sobin, and Lorine Niedecker.

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

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

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

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

Winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Award

“An astonishing book: exotic as a dream, acrid and beautiful and honest as life.”—Barbara Kingsolver

After his mother flees back to the Lower 48, never to return, Cutuk Hawcly is raised along with his older sister and brother by his father, Abe, in an igloo on Alaska’s tundra. Cutuk learns from the local indigenous community how to survive and provide for himself by hunting, fishing, and trading, yet he’s still deemed an outsider by the Iñupiaq residents in the nearby village of Takunak because he’s white. Despite his love for Alaska’s wilderness and Dawna, a young woman in the village, he leaves for the city and its modern-world trappings. But when incompatible realities collide, Cutuk is forced to choose between two worlds, both seemingly bent on rejecting him.

A stunning, powerfully told, and authentically rendered coming-of-age novel, Ordinary Wolves brilliantly captures a young man finding his place in the world that’s shifting in ways he never imagined.

In Taking Care, William Kittredge relates his coming of age on a property his family transformed from a farm dependent on horses to a modern agribusiness. Painfully reflecting on the abandonment of old ways, Kittredge calls for new, radical stories about the West that will foster compassion and caret

“Earnest, attentive, and ruminative.” —KIRKUS  

WINNER OF THE PHILLIP D. REED MEMORIAL AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING WRITING ON THE SOUTHERN ENVIRONMENT

Beyond the oil-soaked pelican, beyond the oil-soaked beach, beyond the Deepwater Horizon oil spill entirely, there is a deeper story of sacrifice unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico. Reporters and government officials focused on the smallest part of it: oil gushed into the water for 153 days, then, on September 19, 2010, the well was capped. The story was over. But for David Gessner the unimaginable amount of oil spilled into the ocean was only the beginning.

In The Tarball Chronicles, Gessner eats, drinks, and talks his way into the heart of Gulf country—exploring the region’s birds, sea life, and ecosystems with the oceanographers, activists, and subsistence fishermen who call it home. Just how much, he asks, are we willing to sacrifice to keep living the way we do? Part absurdist travelogue, part manifesto, The Tarball Chronicles is a love song for the Gulf from an author who has “redefined what it means to write about the natural world” (Washington Post).

Copper Nickel is a meeting place for multiple aesthetics, bringing work that engages with our social and historical context to the world with original pieces and dynamic translations.

Copper Nickel Issue 22 features three essays on contemporary publishing by Dalkey Archive Press founder John O’Brien, Bookslut founder Jessa Crispin, and Virginia Quarterly Review digital editor and Publishers Weekly columnist Jane Friedman. It also includes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction by Norma Farber First Book Award winner Cathy Linh Che, Alice Fay Di Castagnola winner G. C. Waldrep, Soros Foundation Fellow David Keplinger, California Book Award winner Alexandra Teague, Thom Gunn Award winner Charlie Bondhus, Hopwood fellow Rachel Richardson, and numerous emerging and established writers including Jaswinder Bolina, Elyse Fenton, and Bernard Farai Matambo.

Additionally, the issue includes three “Translation Folios” introducing and contextualizing for an American audience work by renowned Turkish poet Haydar Ergülen, Georg Büchner Prize winner Karl Krolow, and Prix Max-Jacob winner Emmanuel Moses in translations by (respectively) Derick Mattern, Stuart Friebert, and National Book Award and Lenore Marshall Prize winner Marilyn Hacker.

The cover of Issue 22 features work by Los Angeles-based artist Christina Stormberg.

Cross-Pollinations is a book about dissolving boundaries and blending disciplines to reveal a world rich in possibility, one where unthinkable solutions emerge.

Gary Paul Nabhan, an accomplished biologist and writer—and “a voice that speaks to the laity in clear and coherent sentences” (New York Times)—believes that the free movement between science and literature, between cultivated and wild habitats, and between culture and language engenders the kind of unlikely and seemingly incompatible perceptions that are essential to discovery of any kind.

In Cross-Pollinations, he illustrates the successful marriage of science and poetry with true stories about color-blind scientists, the knowledge stored in ancient Native American songs, the link between an Amy Clampitt poem and diabetes research, and a unique collaboration in support of the Ironwood Forest National Monument.

Gathering the stories of people whose lives have adapted to the unique features of the North Atlantic coast, the book moves from Wampanoag Indians to eighteenth-century seafarers to contemporary teens.

Readers are invited to feel the throb and pulse of the surf as Helen Keller felt it, track an otter through a southern New Hampshire winter, harvest blueberries as the Micmac Indians once did, and join a young boy as he tries to save a lobster from the cooking pot. The lives of fishermen and women, of sailors lost in the fog, of a whale trapped in a pond in Newfoundland—all become richer and more memorable when woven into the fabric of literature.

The book is divided, as are all books in the series, into four sections: Adventures, Great Places, Reapers and Sowers, and Wild Lives. The treasure trove of stories, poems, journal entries, and essays about the region is followed by a brief natural history, including a list of areas to visit to experience the wilder side of the North Atlantic Coast region.

Completed in 1974, and standing over six feet tall and fourteen feet wide, The Fulbright Triptych is widely considered a masterpiece of contemporary art: a striking family tableau rendered in vivid detail on three wood panels, which has quietly inspired, exhorted, and challenged its viewers for years.

The Suspension of Time is a collection of essays on Simon Dinnerstein’s extraordinary painting, reproduced here in full color. It includes writing by singularly rich range of contributors, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelists Jhumpa Lahiri and Anthony Doerr to acclaimed poet Dan Beachy-Quick, and from art historians such as Colin Eisler, Albert Boime, and Thomas M. Messer to composer George Crumb and actor John Turturro.

Each essay in The Suspension of Time offers its unique perspective, but taken as a whole they develop a dialogue of collaboration that directly reflects The Fulbright Triptych’s inherent message of symphonic connectivity, demonstrating the rich potential for collaboration between visual, literary, musical, and other arts.

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

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

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

Every day Christine’s walk to school takes her past a talking alley cat. And every day the cat’s insights invariably give her something to ponder.

One day her teacher asks the eight-year-old why she is always late for school. Frightened, she reveals the secret of the talking cat. Her punishment: she must write two hundred times, “There are no talking cats, and from now on I will arrive at school on time.” But the cat is real, no matter how many lines Christine writes. And she might just as well leave out the “no”—the headmaster won’t even notice, says the clever cat.

That’s what the cat always says—that life is all about being clever. And always looking out for yourself, first and foremost! But Christine isn’t so sure, and she is a little scared of the cat, too. There must be more to life than self-interest, surely? The cat is spiteful and pitiless. And that’s what Christine doesn’t want to be.

An illustrated modern fable, The Cat is a unique book for both children and adults to enjoy.

A stunning story of summertime and loss from German author Jutta Richter.

Anna, Daniel, and Lucas seem to be living a dream. While their parents take care of a castle, they have the run of the grounds, along with the beautiful countryside that surrounds it. When school lets out, their biggest concern is how to catch the mysterious pike that patrols the dark waters of the moat.

But just as their summer begins, Daniel and Lucas’s mother is taken ill, spending nearly all her time in bed. Anna learns that their mother has cancer, and that Daniel and Lucas have not yet been told. Set adrift on the endless summer days, Anna tries to believe her mother’s promise that it will all be better soon. And as those days gradually shorten and the colors of the fields and flowers change, Daniel becomes convinced that catching the pike will bring luck—that it might even cure his mother. When her condition worsens, these three friends must come together and find courage to face the future.