Search results for ""Milkweed Editions""

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.Issue 28 includes:Fiction by Preeta Samarasan, whose debut novel Evening Is the Whole Day was translated into 15 languages; Asako Serizawa, who has received a Pushcart Prize and two O. Henry Prizes; Scottish fiction writer Kirsty Logan; and NEA Fellow Sarah Strickley.Nonfiction by Guggenheim and NEA fellow Paisley Rekdal; novelist Sheena McAuliffe; and poets Rebecca Lehman and Celia Bland.Poetry by MacArthur “Genius” and National Book Award finalist Edward Hirsch; regular NPR reviewer Tess Taylor; Cave Canem Poetry Prize winner Gary Jackson; Guggenheim fellow Geoffrey Brock; co-founder of VIDA Ann Townsend; Stegner fellow Brian Tierney; NEA fellows Sandra Beasley and Michael Bazzett; Yale Younger winner Sean Singer; Best American Poetry contributor Andrew Feld; author of four poetry collections Heather Christle and author of three collections Catherine Pierce; and numerous emerging poets, such as Dominica Phetteplace, Mejdulene B. Shomali, and Samuel Cheney.Translation Folios featuring work by Israeli poet and editor of the newspaper Haaretz Eli Eliahu, translated by Marcela Sulak; Younger French poet Muriel Pic, writing about the massive, ruined Nazi vacation structure Rügen, and translated by Samuel Martin; contemporary German poet Ute Von Funcke, translated by Stuart Friebert; and ancient Roman poet Martial in new, highly contemporary translations by Tyler Goldman.The cover features work by New York-based artist Xaviera Simmons, whose work has been shown at the MoMA and MoMA PS1 (NYC); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis); the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, among other venues.

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Copper Nickel issue 23 will feature poetry by two-time Pushcart Prize winner Jennifer Atkinson, Kate Tufts Discovery Award winner Adrian Blevins, National Poetry Series winner Justin Boening, renowned poet and critic Stephen Burt, Ruth Lilly Fellow Chloe Honum, two-time NEA Fellow Christopher Howell, Lambda Literary Award finalist Randall Mann, Stegner Fellow L.S. McKee, and Guggenheim Fellow Eric Pankey, as well as emerging voices such as Belfast, Northern Ireland, based poet Andrew Deloss Eaton and Hong Kong based poet Nicholas Wong; fiction by George Brookings, Dan Mancilla, Evelyn Sommers, and Liz Wyckoff; nonfiction by Bangladeshi-American writer Anuradha Bhowmik and NEA Fellow Traci Brimhall; and translation folios featuring Polish poet, critic, and scholar of Roma culture Jerzy Ficowski (translated by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer), Bosnian visual and performance artist Šoba (translated by Paula Gordon) who “publishes” his prose on facebook, and Polish poet Gzegorz Wróblewski (translated by Piotr Gwiazda).The cover of Issue 23 features collage work by Denver-based visual artist Mario Zoots.

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“Offering a deeply necessary, clear-eyed look at who we are as flesh-and-bone bodies during the climate crisis, this is a book that searches and finds meaning in both the hard truths and the value of wonder.”—Ada LimónIn this luminous collection of essays, Ellen Wayland-Smith probes the raw edges of human existence, those periods of life in which our bodies remind us of our transience and the boundaries of the self dissolve.From the Old Testament to Maggie Nelson, these explorations are grounded in a rich network of associations. In an essay on the postpartum body, Wayland-Smith interweaves her experience as a mother with accounts of phantom limbs and Greek mythology to meditate on moments when pieces of our being exist outside our bodies. In order to comprehend diagnoses of depression and breast cancer, she delves into LA hippie culture’s love affair with crystals and Emily Dickinson

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An NPR Best Book of the YearWinner of the CLMP Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction“The Quickening is a book of hope.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White SkyAn astonishing, vital work about Antarctica, climate change, and community.In 2019, fifty-seven scientists and crew set out onboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer. Their destination: the ominous Thwaites Glacier at Antarctica’s western edge. Their goal: to learn as much as possible about this mysterious place, never before visited by humans. And with them is author Elizabeth Rush, who seeks, among other things, the elusive voice of the ice.Rush shares her story of a groundbreaking voyage punctuated by both the sublime—the tangible consequences of our melting icecaps; the staggering waves of the Drake Passage; the torqued, unfamiliar contours of Thwaites—and the everyday moments of living and working in community. A ping

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In the 15 years since this book came out, Marilyn Chin has been widely recognized as a consummate poet of the hybrid experience, blending East and West, popular and high culture, personal and political. Praised for its streetwise lyricism, this groundbreaking volume captures a young immigrant woman's perspective as she encounters the nexus of tradition and commercialism in modern, diverse, and urban California. With this new edition, a modern classic is reintroduced to a new generation of readers.

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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.

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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.

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For eons, female members of the Porcupine caribou herd have made the journey from their winter feeding grounds to their summer calving grounds—which happen to lie on vast reserves of oil. They once roamed borderless wilderness; now they trek from Canada, where they’re protected, to the United States, where they are not. In April 2003, wildlife biologist Karsten Heuer and filmmaker Leanne Allison set out with the Porcupine caribou herd. Walking along with the animals over four mountain ranges, through hundreds of passes, and across dozens of rivers—a thousand-mile journey altogether, from the Yukon Territory to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and then back again—they reached a new understanding of what is at stake in the debate over drilling for oil. More than a tale of grand adventure or an activist tract, however, Being Caribou is a “gripping, cinematic tale” (Los Angeles Times) with the “bite of a political tract” (Washington Post) about the power of wilderness and how it returns us to the roots of human instinct. On the caribou’s trail Heuer and Allison learn what is possible when two people immerse themselves in the uniquely wild experience of migration, discovering in the process a different way of being.

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

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A haunting collection that inhabits a disquieting future where fear is the governing body, “the organ and the tissue / and the cell, the membrane and the organelle.” “Once there were oarfish, opaleyes, olive flounders. Once the oxbows were not overrun with nitrogen.” Part requiem, part bedtime story, Meltwater narrates the awful possibility of doom as well as the grim temptation to numb ourselves to it. Prose poems melt into erasures, erasures swell into lush catalogs. Within this formal ebb and flow, Claire Wahmanholm explores both abundance and annihilation, giving shape and music to our shared human anxieties. What does it mean to bring children into a world like this one? A world where grenades are “the only kind of fruit we can still name”? Where “lightning can strike over / and over without boredom or belief and nothing / is saved”? Where losses, both ecological and personal, proliferate endlessly? Here, a parent’s joy is accompanied by the gnaw of remorse. And yet, Wahmanholm recognizes, children bind us to the world—to its missiles and marvels, to the possibility that there is indeed grace worth “suffer[ing] the empty universe for.”If we are going to worry, let us also at least wonder. If we are going to be seized by terror, let us also be “seized by the topaz sky and the breeze through it.” A glittering, kinetic testament to vanishing—of biodiversity, of climate stability, of a sense of safety—Meltwater is both vindication and balm.

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Telescopes aim to observe the light of the cosmos, but Christopher Brean Murray turns his powerful lens toward the strange darkness of human existence in Black Observatory, selected by Dana Levin as winner of the Jake Adam York Prize. With speakers set adrift in mysterious settings—a motel in the middle of a white-sand desert, a house haunted by the ghost of a dead writer, an abandoned settlement high in the mountains, a city that might give way to riotous forest—Black Observatory upends the world we think we know. Here, an accident with a squirrel proves the least bizarre moment of a day that is ordinary in outline only. The future is revealed in a list of odd crimes-to-be. And in a field of grasses, a narrator loses himself in a past and present “human conflagration / of desire and doubt,” the “path to a field of unraveling.”Unraveling lies at the heart of these poems. Murray picks at the frayed edges of everyday life, spinning new threads and weaving an uncanny and at times unnerving tapestry in its place. He arranges and rearranges images until the mundane becomes distorted: a cloud “stretches and coils and becomes an intestine / embracing the anxious protagonist,” thoughts “leap from sagebrush / like jackrabbits into your high beams,” a hot black coffee tastes “like runoff from a glacier.” In the process, our world emerges in surprising, disquieting relief.Simultaneously comic and tragic, playful and deeply serious, Black Observatory is a singular debut collection, a portrait of reality in penumbra.

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Winner of the 2020 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, The Clearing navigates the ever-shifting poles of violence and vulnerability with rich imagination and a singular incisiveness, “asserting feminist viewpoints and mortal terror in lush musical lines” (New York Times). The women in Allison Adair’s debut collection—luminous and electric from the first line to the last—live in places that have been excavated for gold and precious ores. They understand the nature of being hollowed out, of being “the planet’s stone / core as it tries to carve out one secret place and fails.” And so, as these poems take us from the midst of the Civil War to our current era, they chart fairy tales that are at once unsettling and painfully familiar, never forgetting that cruelty compels us to search for tenderness. “What if this time,” they ask, “instead of crumbs the girl drops / teeth, her own, what else does she have.” Adair sees the dirt beneath our nails, both alone and as a country, and pries it gently loose until we remember something of who we are, “from before . . . from a similar injury or kiss.” There is a dark tension in this work, and its product is wholly “an alchemical feat, turning horror into beauty” (Boston Globe).

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WINNER OF THE MILKWEED PRIZE FOR CHILDREN'S LITERATURE WINNER OF THE 2013 PATERSON PRIZE FOR BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS ALA RAINBOW LIST RECOMMENDED BOOK AMELIA BLOOMER PROJECT LIST RECOMMENDED BOOK LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST MINNESOTA BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOREWARD REVIEWS BOOK OF THE YEAR HONORABLE MENTION In the summer of 1926, sixteen-year-old Garnet Richardson is sent to a lake resort to escape the polio epidemic in the city. She dreams of indulging in ornithology and a visit to an amusement park--a summer of fun before she returns to a last year of high school, marriage, and middle-class homemaking. But in the country, Garnet finds herself under supervision of oppressive guardians, her father's wealthy cousin and the matron's stuck-up daughter. Only a job in a hat shop, an intense, secret relationship with a beautiful flapper, and a deep faith in her own heart can save her from the suffocation of traditional femininity in this coming-of-age story about a search for both wildness and security in an era full of unrest. It is the tale of a young woman's discovery of the science of risk and the art of rebellion, and, of course, the power of unexpected love.

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Somewhere between elegy and memoir, poetry and prose, Ed Pavlić’s Call It in the Air follows the death of a sister into song.Pavlić’s collection traces the life and death of his elder sister, Kate: a brilliant, talented, tormented woman who lived on her own terms to the very end. Kate’s shadow hovers like a penumbra over these pages that unfold a kaleidoscope of her world. A small-town apartment full of “paintings & burritos & pyramid-shaped empty bottles of Patron & an ad hoc anthology of vibrators.” A banged-up Jeep, loose syringes underfoot, rattles under Colorado skies. Near an ICU bed, Pavlić agonizes over the most difficult questions, while doctors “swish off to the tune of their thin-soled leather loafers.” And a diary, left behind, brims with revelations of vulnerability nearly as great as Pavlić’s own.But Call It in the Air records more than a relationship between brother and sister, more than a moment of personal loss. “I sit while eleven bodies of mine fall all over the countless mysteries of who you are,” he writes, while “Somewhere along the way, heat blasting past us & out the open jeep, the mountain sky turned to black steel & swung open its empty mouth.” In moments like these, Pavlić recognizes something of his big sister everywhere.Rived by loss and ravaged by grief, Call It in the Air mingles the voices of brother and sister, one falling and one forgiven, to offer an intimate elegy that meditates on love itself.

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From Michael Bazzett, poet and translator of The Popol Vuh, a collection that explores the myth of Echo and Narcissus, offering a reboot, a remix, a reimagining. “Narcissus was never one to see himself // in moving water. // He liked his image / still.” In The Echo Chamber, myth is refracted into our current moment. A time traveler teaches a needleworker the pleasures of social media gratification. A man goes looking for his face and is first offered a latex mask. A book reveals eerie transmutations of a simple story. And the myth itself is retold, probing its most provocative qualities—how reflective waters enable self-absorption, the tragic rightness of Echo and Narcissus as a couple. The Echo Chamber examines our endlessly self-referential age of selfies and televised wars and manufactured celebrity, gazing lingeringly into the many kinds of damage it produces, and the truths obscured beneath its polished surface. In the process, Bazzett cements his status as one of our great poetic fools—the comedian who delivers uncomfortable silence, who sheds layers of disguises to reveal light underneath, who smuggles wisdom within “rage-mothered laughter.” Late-stage capitalism, history, death itself: all are subject to his wry, tender gaze. By turns searing, compassionate, and darkly humorous, The Echo Chamber creates an echo through time, holding up the broken mirror of myth to our present-day selves.

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What is illusion—a deception, or a revelation? What is a poem—the truth, or “a diverting flash, / a mirror showing everything / but itself”?Nicky Beer’s latest collection of poems is a labyrinthine academy specializing in the study of subterfuge; Marlene Dietrich, Dolly Parton, and Batman are its instructors. With an energetic eye, she thumbs through our collective history books—and her personal one, too—in an effort to chart the line between playful forms of duplicity and those that are far more insidious.Through delicious japery, poems that can be read multiple ways, and allusions ranging from Puccini’s operas to Law & Order, Beer troubles the notion of truth. Often, we settle for whatever brand of honesty is convenient for us, or whatever is least likely to spark confrontation—but this, Beer knows, is how we invite others to weigh in on what kind of person we are. This is how we trick ourselves into believing they’re right. “Listen / to how quiet it is when I lose the self-doubt played / for so long I mistook it for music.”Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes asks us to look through the stereoscope: which image is the real one? This one—or this one, just here? With wisdom, humility, and a forthright tenderness, Nicky Beer suggests that we consider both—together, they might contribute to something like truth.

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Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award FinalistA thoughtful new collection of poems, one that deconstructs the deceptively simple question of what it means to be good—a good person, a good citizen, a good teacher, a good poet, a good father. With These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit, Hayan Charara presents readers with a medley of ambitious analyses, written in characteristically wry verse. He takes philosophers to task, jousts with academics, and scrutinizes hollow gestures of empathy, exposing the dangers of thinking ourselves “separate / from [our] thoughts and experiences.” After all, “No work of love / will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart.” But how do we act on fullness of heart? How, knowing as we do that “genocide is inscribed in our earliest and holiest texts”? Thoughtful but never preachy, Charara sits beside us, granting us access to life’s countless unglamorous dilemmas: crushing a spider when we promised we wouldn’t, nearing madness from a newborn’s weeping, resenting our lovers for what happened in a dream. “Good poems demand to be written from inside the poet,” we are reminded. And that is where we find ourselves here: inside a lively and ethical mind, entertained by Charara’s good company even as goodness challenges us to do more.

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“Pankey writes poems that give us back, if not the world, our relation to it.” —DAN BEACHY-QUICK Taking its name from the Roman goddess of wisdom and her companion bird, Owl of Minerva turns astonishingly precise attention to the physical world, scouring it for evidence of the spiritual as the poet travels through such places as Appalachia, New England, Venice, Spain, the Caribbean, and the American Midwest. Along the way, Pankey ponders mortality, religious narratives and iconography, the continued press of childhood on the present, and the simultaneous violence and beauty of the natural world. At the book’s core are three ambitious poems titled “The Complete List of Everything,” which together offer an extended vision of American longing and connection—as well as a window into the sort of compendium of images and moments a sustained devotion to poetry can yield. “The hope was to construct // A coherent totality of meaning from odds / And ends,” Pankey writes, and so much of this book is about the difficult work of constructing meaning from the available material all around us. This book is an extraordinary example of lyric-meditative journaling—a large and profound collection by a brilliant poet writing at the height of his powers.

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FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD A NEW YORKER BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2018 A VULTURE BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2018 A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2018 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.

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Kathryn Cowles’s Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World is a collection that lingers in memory and place, in the unsettled distance between reality and its transcriptions. “I take seven photographs turning / in a circle, a panorama, / but how will I place them hanging / on a wall back home? Something already slipping,” Cowles writes. These poems surround a central question: how much of a moment is captured by the mechanisms we use to describe it? How much of the shore, the birds, the feeling? In pursuit of an answer, Cowles leads readers through a sequence of distinct landscapes (islands, plains, mountains, oceans) with both traditional lyricism and the playful refrains of a speaker fixated on the dilemma of representation. “Holy photograph. Holy actual world. Equal sign equal sign equal sign.” Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World both puzzles over and embraces the valley between literature and lived experience. Along the way, Cowles’s language is light but recursive, rotating around beloved places: a new house, a garden, a seemingly endless plane ride, a battery-operated spit of lamb, a photograph of a battery-operated spit of lamb, dogs, Sue, Ohio. This collection defamiliarizes and refamiliarizes the “actual world,” while navigating toward the clear and substantial stuff of living. Arresting on both visual and textual levels, Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World is executed with the utmost intelligence, humility, and tenderness.

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Winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the EssayWinner of the 2022 Southern Book PrizeAn Indie Next Selection for September 2021A Book Marks Best Reviewed Essay Collection of 2021A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2021A Country Living Best Book of Fall 2021A Garden & Gun Recommended Read for Fall 2021A Book Marks Best Reviewed Book of September 2021For the past four years, Margaret Renkl’s columns have offered readers of The New York Times a weekly dose of natural beauty, human decency, and persistent hope from her home in Nashville. Now more than sixty of those pieces have been brought together in this sparkling new collection.“People have often asked me how it feels to be the ‘voice of the South,’” writes Renkl in her introduction. “But I’m not the voice of the South, and no one else is, either.” There are many Souths—red and blue, rural and urban, mountain and coast, Black and white and brown—and no one writer could possibly represent all of them. In Graceland, At Last, Renkl writes instead from her own experience about the complexities of her homeland, demonstrating along the way how much more there is to this tangled region than many people understand.In a patchwork quilt of personal and reported essays, Renkl also highlights some other voices of the South, people who are fighting for a better future for the region. A group of teenagers who organized a youth march for Black Lives Matter. An urban shepherd whose sheep remove invasive vegetation. Church parishioners sheltering the homeless. Throughout, readers will find the generosity of spirit and deep attention to the world, human and nonhuman, that keep readers returning to her columns each Monday morning.From a writer who “makes one of all the world’s beings” (NPR), Graceland, At Last is a book full of gifts for Southerners and non-Southerners alike.

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Winner of the 2022 Southern Book PrizeWinner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the EssayAn Indie Next Selection for September 2021A Book Marks Best Reviewed Essay Collection of 2021A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2021A Country Living Best Book of Fall 2022A Garden & Gun Recommended Read for Fall 2021A Book Marks Best Reviewed Book of September 2021From the author of the bestselling #ReadWithJenna/TODAY Show book club pick Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and LossFor the past four years, Margaret Renkl’s columns have offered readers of The New York Times a weekly dose of natural beauty, human decency, and persistent hope from her home in Nashville. Now more than sixty of those pieces have been brought together in this sparkling new collection.“People have often asked me how it feels to be the ‘voice of the South,’” writes Renkl in her introduction. “But I’m not the voice of the South, and no one else is, either.” There are many Souths—red and blue, rural and urban, mountain and coast, Black and white and brown—and no one writer could possibly represent all of them. In Graceland, At Last, Renkl writes instead from her own experience about the complexities of her homeland, demonstrating along the way how much more there is to this tangled region than many people understand.In a patchwork quilt of personal and reported essays, Renkl also highlights some other voices of the South, people who are fighting for a better future for the region. A group of teenagers who organized a youth march for Black Lives Matter. An urban shepherd whose sheep remove invasive vegetation. Church parishioners sheltering the homeless. Throughout, readers will find the generosity of spirit and deep attention to the world, human and nonhuman, that keep readers returning to her columns each Monday morning.From a writer who “makes one of all the world’s beings” (NPR), Graceland, At Last is a book full of gifts for Southerners and non-Southerners alike.

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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).

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Named a "Best Book of the Year" by New Statesman, New York Public Library, Chicago Public Library, and Washington Independent Review of BooksSouthern Book Prize FinalistFrom New York Times contributing opinion writer Margaret Renkl comes an unusual, captivating portrait of a family—and of the cycles of joy and grief that inscribe human lives within the natural world.Growing up in Alabama, Renkl was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and red-dirt roads, and a fiercely loved daughter. Here, in brief essays, she traces a tender and honest portrait of her complicated parents—her exuberant, creative mother; her steady, supportive father—and of the bittersweet moments that accompany a child’s transition to caregiver.And here, braided into the overall narrative, Renkl offers observations on the world surrounding her suburban Nashville home. Ringing with rapture and heartache, these essays convey the dignity of bluebirds and rat snakes, monarch butterflies and native bees. As these two threads haunt and harmonize with each other, Renkl suggests that there is astonishment to be found in common things: in what seems ordinary, in what we all share. For in both worlds—the natural one and our own—“the shadow side of love is always loss, and grief is only love’s own twin.”Gorgeously illustrated by the author’s brother, Billy Renkl, Late Migrations is an assured and memorable debut.

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Copper Nickel is the national literary journal housed at the University of Colorado Denver. It is edited by poet, editor, and translator Wayne Miller (author of five collections, including We the Jury and Post-, coeditor of Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century, and co-translator of Moikom Zeqo’s Zodiac) and co-editor Joanna Luloff (author of the novel Remind Me Again What Happened and the story collection The Beach at Galle Road)—along with poetry editors Brian Barker (author of Vanishing Acts, The Black Ocean, and The Animal Gospels) and Nicky Beer (author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes, The Octopus Game and The Diminishing House), and fiction editors Teague Bohlen (author of The Pull of the Earth), Alexander Lumans (whose work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Gulf Coast, The Paris Review, Story Quarterly, and elsewhere), and Christopher Merkner (author of The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic). Since the journal’s relaunch in 2015, work published in Copper Nickel has been regularly selected for inclusion in Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, Best Small Fictions, Best Literary Translations, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and has often been listed as “notable” in the Best American Essays. According to Clifford Garstang’s US literary journal rankings, Copper Nickel is ranked number 10 for poetry and number 34 for fiction, out of more than 700 regularly publishing literary journals. Contributors to Copper Nickel have received numerous honors for their work, including the Nobel Prize; the National Book Critics Circle Award; the Pulitzer Prize; the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; the Laughlin Award; the American, California, Colorado, Minnesota, and Washington State Book Awards; the Georg Büchner Prize; the Prix Max Jacob; the Lenore Marshall Prize; the T. S. Eliot and Forward Prizes; the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award; the Lambda Literary Award; as well as fellowships from the NEA and the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill, Witter Bynner, Soros, Rona Jaffee, Bush, and Jerome Foundations. Copper Nickel is published twice a year, on March 15 and October 15, and is distributed nationally to bookstores and other outlets by Publishers Group West (PGW) and Accelerate 360.Issue 37 Includes: • Poetry Translation Folios with work by Ukrainian poet Alex Averbuch, translated by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky; Russian poet Anzhelina Polonskaya, translated by Andrew Wachtel; and Italian fiction writer Elena Varvello, translated by Jennifer Panek. • A feature of poems by three South American poets—Claudia Magliano from Uruguay, Eliana Hernández Pachón from Colombia, and Úrsula Starke from Chile—edited by Jesse Lee Kercheval and featuring a Q&A with both the poets and the translators. • New Poetry by International Latino Book Award–winner William Archila; NEA Fellows Michael Bazzett and Amy Beeder; Lambda Literary Award–winner Benjamin S. Grossberg; Kate Tufts Discovery Award–finalist Julie Hanson; Grolier Prize–winner John Hodgen; four-time Pushcart Prize–winner Mark Irwin; Jake Adam York Prize–winners Yalie Saweda Kamara and Christopher Brean Murray; Audre Lorde Award–winners Meg Day and Maureen Seaton; relative newcomers Mansi Dahal, Christine Kwon, Weijia Pan, Patrick Wilcox, Alison Zheng; and many others. • New Fiction by Stephanie Carpenter, Becky Hagenston, Jacqueline Kolosov, and Luke Rolfes/ • New Essays by TS Eliot Award–winner and National Book Critics Circle Finalist Sinéad Morrissey and Anne P. Beatty. • Cover Art by New York–based Native-American “photo-weaving” artist, Sarah Sense.Contributor LocationsContributors to issue 37 come from all over the country and the world.U.S. cities/regions where contributors are concentrated include:Denver, CO (home of Copper Nickel and the Copper Nickel staff; contributors Andrew Hemmert andMaureen Seaton)Los Angeles, CA (contributors William Archila, Mark Irwin, and Michael Mark; contributing editorsVictoria Chang, Piotr Florczyk, Amaud Jamaul Johnson, and Chris Santiago)Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN (home of Milkweed Editions; contributors Mair Allen and MichaelBazzett; contributing editor V. V. Ganeshananthan)Houston, TX (contributors Ayokunle Falomo, Christopher Brean Murray, and Weijia Pan;contributing editor Kevin Prufer)New York, NY (contributors Mansi Dahal, Eliana Herández Pachón, and Tyler Mills)Chicago, IL (contributors Oksana Maksymchuk and Michael Robins; contributing editor RobertArchambeau)San Francisco Bay Area, CA (contributor Alison Zheng; contributing editor Randall Mann)Kansas City, MO (contributor Patrick Wilcox; contributing editor Robert Long Foreman)Greensboro, NC (contributor Anne P. Beatty; contributing editor Emilia Phillips)Dallas, TX (contributor Mag Gabbert; contributing editor Tarfia Faizullah)Boston/Cambridge, MA (contributing editors Martha Collins and Frederick Reiken)Pittsburgh, PA (contributing editors Joy Katz and Kevin Haworth)Maryville, MO (contributors John Gallaher and Luke Rolphes)US Cities/Regions with single contributors:West Hartford, CT (contributor Benjamin S. Grossberg)Cedar Rapids, IA (contributor Julie Hanson)Dubuque, IA (contributor Jeannine Marie Pitas)New Orleans, LA (contributor Christine Kwon)Worcester, MA (contributor John Hodgen)Frederick, MD (contributor Elizabeth Knapp)Hannock, MI (contributor Stephanie Carpenter)Grand Rapids, MI (contributor L. S. Klatt)Starkville, MS (contributor Becky Hagenston)Raleigh, NC (contributor Meg Day)Omaha, NE (contributor Trey Moody)Albuquerque, NM (contributor Amy Beeder)Cincinnati, OH (contributor Yalie Saweda Kamara)Easton, PA (contributor Owen McLeod)Lubbock, TX (contributor Jacqueline Kolosov)Lexington, VA (contributor Seth Michelson)Bellingham, WA (contributor Jeffrey Morgan)Ellensburg, WA (contributor Maya Jewell Zeller)Eau Claire, WI (contributor Dorothy Chan)Madison, WI (contributor Jesse Lee Kercheval)Ottawa, Ontario (contributor Jennifer Panek)Philadelphia, PA (contributing editor Adrienne Perry)Washington, DC (contributing editor David Keplinger)Boca Raton, FL (contributing editor A. Papatya Bucak)Boise, ID (contributing editor Emily Ruskovich)Lexington, KY (contributing editor Ada Limón)Princeton, NJ (contributing editor James Richardson)Canton, NY (contributing editor Pedro Ponce)Saint Louis, MO (contributing editor Niki Herd)Missoula, MT (contributing editor Sean Hill)Tulsa, OK (contributing editor Kaveh Bassiri)Blacksburg, VA (contributing editor Janine Joseph) International contributors live in:Montevideo, UruguayNewcastle-upon-Tyne, UKMexico City, MXSan Bernardo, ChileTurin, ItalyBishkek, Kyrgyzstan

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Sara Eliza Johnson’s much-anticipated second collection traces human emotion and experience across a Gothic landscape of glacial and cosmic scale.With a mind informed by physics, and a heart yearning for sky burial, Vapor’s epic vision swerves from the microscopic to telescopic, evoking an Anthropocene for a body and planet that are continually dying: “So alone / I open like a grave,” Johnson chronicles her love for “all this emptiness, this warp and transparence, the whorl of atoms I brush from your brow,” and considers how “each skull, / like a geode, holds a crystal colony inside.” Almost omnipresently, Vapor stitches stars to microbes, oceans to space, and love to pain, collapsing time and space to converge everything at once. Blood and honey, fire and shadow, even death and mercy are secondary to a profoundly constant flux. Facing sunlight, Johnson wonders what it would mean to “put my mouth to its / mouth, suck the fluid / from its throat, and give / it my breath, my skin, / which was once my / shadow,” while elsewhere the moon “is molten, an ancient red, and at its bottom is an exit wound that opens into another sea, immaculate and blue, that could move a dead planet to bloom.”In Vapor, Sara Eliza Johnson establishes herself as a profound translator of the physical world and the body that moves within it, delivering poems that show us how to die, and live.

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Fifteen-year-old Calli has just about everything she could want in life--two loving moms, a good-looking boyfriend, and a best friend who has always been there for support. An only child, Calli is excited when her parents announce that they want to be foster parents. Unfortunately, being a foster sister to Cherish is not at all what Calli expected. First Cherish steals Calli's boyfriend, then begins to pit Calli's moms against one another, and she even steals Calli's iPod. Tired of being pushed around and determined to get even, Calli steals one of Cherish's necklaces. But this plan for revenge goes horribly awry, and Cherish ends up in juvenile detention. Isolating herself from her moms, her boyfriend, and even her best friend, Calli wrestles with her guilt and tries to figure out a way to undo the damage she's caused. When her moms are asked to take on another foster child, Calli sees an opportunity to make amends for her past mistakes. Funny, moving, and emotionally rich, Calli is a portrait of an endearing young woman caught between adolescence and adulthood, striving to do the right thing even when all of her options seem wrong.

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Mattie, Ariel, and Nicki are fast friends facing the uncertainty of being thirteen. Mattie’s kitschy pig collection and agoraphobic mother might completely derail her social life. Ariel’s attempts to follow in Rachael Ray’s culinary footsteps have landed her in hot water. And Nicki is carrying a secret that threatens to cut her off from her best friends. After finding a book of spells, the three girls perform a ritual that will grant each the object of her desire. This requires that they each bury something special: for Ariel, a tiny antique spoon; for Nicki, a thumb-sized leather mother-and-child doll; and for Mattie, a small ceramic pig with real gold inlays. When the magic starts to take effect, the girls’ longed-for wishes carry unintended, and unwelcome, consequences. Several disasters later, the friends fear that their ritual is working against them. Can they break the spell before their problems spiral out of control? Wonderfully funny and absorbing, Discovering Pig Magic captures the everyday lives of three quirky, engaging girls, and shows that some wishes may be better left unfulfilled.

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It's 1942. Thirteen-year-old Korinna Rehme is an active member of her local Jungmadel, a Nazi youth group, along with many of her friends. She believes that Hitler is helping Germany by instituting a program to deal with what he calls the "Jewish problem," a program that she witnesses as her Jewish neighbors are attacked and taken from their homes. Korinna's parents, however, are members of a secret underground group providing a means of escape to the Jews of their city. Korinna is shocked to discover that they are hiding a refugee family behind the wall of her bedroom. But as she comes to know the family, her sympathies begin to turn. When someone tips off the Gestapo, loyalties are put to the test and Korinna must decide what she really believes and whom she really trusts. Filled with adventure, Behind the Bedroom Wall helps readers understand the forces that drove so many to turn on their neighbors and the courage that allowed some to resist.

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From swimming to the bottom of the ocean to reclaim a sunken boat, to standing up to bullies, to asking questions that might have painful answers, twelve year-old Donovan Sanger has some capabilities that the grown-ups around don't. This is why his dad has asked Donovan to go spend the summer with an Aunt and Uncle he barely knows. Aunt Hattie has become very ill with lung cancer and she and Uncle Bix need "a little moral support," as Donovan’s dad puts it. Uncle Bix is a mechanical genius who just a couple of years ago was released from jail for his role in a robbery. Before a week goes by, Donovan is sent underwater in a wetsuit so small he can barely breathe, is given a very short haircut in his sleep by Uncle Bix, who says it will "give him some strength," and learns that his uncle’s criminal past might be something he has not entirely left behind. As the summer progresses, Donovan helps brings a boat up from the bottom of Puget Sound and care for his Aunt, all the while trying to discover just what Uncle Bix is doing at secret meetings with his ex-convict friends.

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Finalist for the 2021 Housatonic Book Award in Poetry “The thin knife that severed your tumor,” writes Brooke Matson in these poems, “it cleaves me still.” What to do when a world is split—terribly, wholly—by grief? When the loss of the beloved undermines the most stable foundations, the most sacred spaces, of that world? What else but to interrogate the very fundamental principles themselves, all the knowns previously relied on: light, religion, physical matter, time? Often borrowing voices and perspectives from its scientific subjects, In Accelerated Silence investigates the multidimensional nature of grief and its blurring of boundaries—between what is present and what is absent, between what is real and imagined, between the promises of science and the mysteries of human knowing, and between the pain that never ends and the world that refuses to. The grieving and the seeking go on, Matson suggests, but there comes a day when we emerge, “now strong enough / to venture out of doors, thin // and swathed in a robe,” only to find it has continued “full and flourishing and larger than before.” Sensual and devastating, In Accelerated Silence—selected by Mark Doty as winner of the Jake Adam York Prize—creates an unforgettable portrait of loss full of urgency and heartache and philosophical daring.

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WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDFINALIST FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARDFrom 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.

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From James P. Lenfestey, a collection of poems that lends delicacy and gentle humor to durable, long-lasting love. Writing love poems fifty years into a marriage is no easy task: "If he exaggerates his love, she'll know . . . And if his desire for her is undiminished, / who would believe?" But in A Marriage Book, Lenfestey meets his own challenge with aplomb. These poems drop readers into the rich, textured world of one couple's enduring intimacy, from the warmth of a bedroom occupied by two to squabbles over miscommunications and crumbs in the kitchen. As the marriage (and the Book) transition into parenthood, Lenfestey illuminates the equally stalwart wonder of observing one's children as they age and develop. Paternal love persists, and is even fed by, watching his children argue, suffer their own mistakes, and roar horrible breath at breakfast. So much poetry is about storms, / bruised fruit, locusts eating everything," he writes. "This poem is about a harvest that satisfies." A Marriage Book is a collection that essences the magic from the household quotidian, creating a technicolor portrait of a vibrant and dynamic family.

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In poems brilliantly textured and layered, Salgado Maranhao integrates socio-political thought with subjects abstractly metaphysical. Concrete collides with conceptual--butcher shops, sex, and machine guns in conversation with language, absence, and time--resulting in a collection varied as well as unified, an aesthetic at once traditional and postmodern. Writing in forms both fixed and free, Maranhao's language suggests a jazz-like musicality that rings true in Alexis Levitin's masterful translations. For readers who enjoy the complexity of Charles Simic, or the stylistically innovative syntax of Cesar Vallejo, Maranhao's Blood of the Sun is a sensually provocative amalgamation of both.

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An "exquisitely crafted" third collection of poems, this winner of the second-annual Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry offers a "prismatic portrait of the female body in the act of being touched" (G.C. Waldrep) The 18th-century glass armonica, a musical instrument whose sound emits from rotating water-filled vessels, has long held the power to mesmerize with its hauntingly sorrowful tones. Just as its song, which was once thought to induce insanity, wraps itself in and around the mind, Rebecca Dunham probes the depths of human psyche, inhabiting the voices of historical female "hysterics" and inciting in readers a tranquil unease. These are poems spoken through and for the melancholic, the hysteric, the body dysmorphic -- from Mary Glover to Lavinia Dickinson to Freud's famed patient, Dora. And like expert hands placed gently on the armonica's rotating disks, Dunham offers unsettling depictions of uninvited human contact -- of hands laid upon the female body, of touch at times unwanted, and ultimately unspeakable from behind the hysteric's "locked jaws." Winner of the 2013 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, Dunham's stunning third collection is "lush yet septic" (G.C. Waldrep), at once beautiful and unnerving.

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"THE EARTH BROKE OPEN CAUSE WE BROKE IT OPEN," blares the first line of this enrapturing debut collection mapping the myth of Narcissus and Echo and the Iron Range roots of Bob Dylan onto a world growing increasingly self-obsessed. Against the backdrop of the mining town of Hibbing, Minnesota, Brian Laidlaw examines the ways narcissism has flooded culture. Much like a "hawk has a horizontal sweet spot on its retina / for spotting prey on the prairie," the speaker of these poems "has a narcissus / shaped sweet spot / all the better to spot himself." The volume comes combined with a brand new LP from Laidlaw produced by Brett Bullion, co-arranged by Hibbing native Danny Vitali, and featuring members of The Pines and Halloween, Alaska. Expanding on the themes addressed in Narcissus the Stuntman, the album provides listeners an innovative multimedia experience.

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The narrators in this mesmerizing collection often desire to hold time still -- in moments of love, yes, but also when feeling fully located in a particular place or experience. Yet they also acknowledge that to hold time still would mean the death of love, the death of experience. Thus, the grounding and locating sensory images that surround us -- and the eye that apprehends them -- become greatly important. At the heart of the book is "What Night Says to the Empty Boat," a sequence of lyric poems in which the three main characters -- Justine, Clarence, and Andy -- drift to and from, together and apart, viewed through the dispassionate lens of the unspoken fourth main character. An artistic and philosophical endeavor to place oneself in the world, this stunning collection is a wholehearted embrace of being, where technique and subject come together in a remarkable combination of personal lyric and formal innovation.

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In Fancy Beasts, the author of Hallelujah Blackout and Mosquito takes on California, the 2008 election, plastic surgery, Larry Craig, wildfires, Wal-Mart, and rampant commercialism -- in short, the modern American media culture, which provides obscene foil for his personal legacies of violence and violation. This pivotal book captures the turning point in a life of abuse, in which the recovering victim/perpetrator puzzles through the paradigm of son-to-husband-to-father. Frenetic, hilarious, and fearless, these poems are a workout -- vigorous and raw. Yet they are also composed and controlled, pared down and sculpted, with a disarming narrative simplicity and directness. Even when dealing with toxic content, the point of view is always genuine and trustworthy. This stunning achievement marks Alex Lemon's best work yet.

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The nineteenth century is often viewed as a golden age of American literature, a historical moment when national identity was emergent and ideals such as freedom, democracy, and individual agency were promising, even if belied in reality by violence and hypocrisy. The writers of this “American Renaissance”—Thoreau, Fuller, Whitman, Emerson, and Dickinson, among many others—produced a body of work that has been both celebrated and contested by following generations.As the twenty-first century unfolds in a United States characterized by deep divisions, diminished democracy, and dramatic transformation of identities, the co-editors of this singular book approached a dozen North American poets, asking them to engage with texts by their predecessors in a manner that avoids both aloofness from the past and too-easy elegy. The resulting essays dwell provocatively on the border between the lyrical and the scholarly, casting fresh critical light on the golden age of American literature and exploring a handful of texts not commonly included in its canon.A polyvocal collection that reflects the complexity of the cross-temporal encounter it enacts, 21 | 19 offers a re-reading of the “American Renaissance” and new possibilities for imaginative critical practice today.

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8,000 hardcover units shipped, and counting Number of fly anglers in the US is estimated at four million-a wealthy, well-read community-and Deep Water Cay, the geographic center of this book, is their Shangri-La: We've only scratched the surface of the potential market Word-of-mouth pickup has been incredible, with reviews coming from unexpected sources, like Robert Rubin, former U.S. Treasury Secretary, calling it a "Best Book of 2016" in Bloomberg Title is tracking similar to Braiding Sweetgrass, which has shipped close to 75,000 units LTD Package features incredible blurbs (Jim Harrison, David James Duncan, and Ian Frazier), and beautiful two-color interior with light blue ink to call out special elements and images Review coverage continues to roll in from publications like Angler's Journal and Fly Rod & Reel and author is published regularly in magazines ranging from Orion to Outside

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

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