Search results for ""milkweed editions""

From African American to Asian American, indigenous to immigrant, "multiracial" to "mixedblood," the diversity of cultures in this world is matched only by the diversity of stories explaining our cultural origins: stories of creation and destruction, displacement and heartbreak, hope and mystery. With writing from Jamaica Kincaid on the fallacies of national myths, Yusef Komunyakaa connecting the toxic legacy of his hometown, Bogalusa, LA, to a blind faith in capitalism, and bell hooks relating the quashing of multiculturalism to the destruction of nature that is considered "unpredictable" -- amongst more than 35 other examinations of the relationship between culture and nature -- this collection points toward the trouble of ignoring our cultural heritage, but also reveals how opening our eyes and our minds might provide a more livable future. The Colors of Nature comes in four alternating-color covers: red, yellow, green, and blue.

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Chosen by Randall Mann as a winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, Brian Tierney’s Rise and Float depicts the journey of a poet working—remarkably, miraculously—to make our most profound, private wounds visible on the page. With the “corpse of Frost” under his heel, Tierney reckons with a life that resists poetic rendition. The transgenerational impact of mental illness, a struggle with disordered eating, a father’s death from cancer, the loss of loved ones to addiction and suicide—all of these compound to “month after / month” and “dream / after dream” of struck-through lines. Still, Tierney commands poetry’s cathartic potential through searing images: wallpaper peeling like “wrist skin when a grater slips,” a “laugh as good as a scream,” pears as hard as a tumor. These poems commune with their ghosts not to overcome, but to release. The course of Rise and Float is not straightforward. Where one poem gently confesses to “trying, these days, to believe again / in people,” another concedes that “defeat / sometimes is defeat / without purpose.” Look: the chair is just a chair.” But therein lies the beauty of this collection: in the proximity (and occasional overlap) of these voices, we see something alluringly, openly human. Between a boy “torn open” by dogs and a suicide, “two beautiful teenagers are kissing.” Between screams, something intimate—hope, however difficult it may be.

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Larry Watson's bestselling novel Montana, 1948 was acclaimed as a "work of art" (Susan Petro, San Francisco Chronicle), a prize-winning evocation of a time, a place, and a family. Now Watson returns to Montana, 1948's vast landscape with a stunning prequel that illuminates the Hayden clan's early years and the circumstances that led to the events of Montana, 1948. With the precision of a master storyteller, Watson moves seamlessly among the strong and hard-bitten characters that make up the Hayden family, and in the process opens an evocative window on the very heart of the American West.

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Issue 31/2 is a special double issue, featuring nationally renowned American writers and nine translation folios with generous selections of work by internationally known writers from Argentina, French-Speaking Belgium, Germany, Greece, Mexico, Poland, the , South Korea, and the Galician Region of Spain. The issue includes: Poetry by Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa; National Book Award finalist and Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner Carl Phillips; Guggenheim Fellows Terese Svoboda, David Kirby, and Mark Halliday; two-time Lambda Literary Award winner Maureen Seaton; Rockefeller Foundation Fellow Pablo Medina; Lenore Marshall Prize winner Craig Morgan Teicher; Kresge Arts Foundation and Kundiman Fellow Matthew Olzmann; Ohioana Book Award winner Ruth Awad; Kundiman Prize winner Janine Joseph; Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award winner G. C. Waldrep; Lambda Literary Award finalist Randall Mann; as well as Michael Bazzett, Jehanne Dubrow, Sarah Gridley, Joy Katz, Hailey Leithauser, Claire Wahmanholm, and many others. Fiction by Maxim Loskutoff, an NPR Best Book author and New York Times Editor’s Pick; as well as by Cara Blue Adams, Gerri Brightwell, Aidan Forster, Ryan Habermeyer, Nihal Mubarak, and Carolyn Oliver. Nonfiction by PEN Center USA Literary Award and California Book Award winner Victoria Chang, art and literature critic Robert Archambeau (writing on the “spirituality” of Andy Warhol), and relative newcomer Caroline Plasket. Translation Folios with poetry by Filipino poet Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles (translated by Kristine Ong Muslim), Mexican poet Cesar Cañedo (translated by Whitney DeVos), (translated by Jennifer Kronovet), Franco-Belgian poet Guy Goffette (translated by Marilyn Hacker), Greek poet Dimitra Kotoula (translated by Maria Nazos), Polish poet Ewa Lipska (translated by Robin Davidson and Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska, South Korean poet Moon Bo Young (translated by Hedgie Choi), Galician/Spanish poet Chus Pato (translated by Erín Moure), and Argentinian fiction writer, journalist, and political martyr Rodolfo Walsh (translated by Cindy Schuster). The cover features work by New York-based artist and Gordon Parks Foundation fellow Derrick Adams, whose work has shown nationally and been featured on the television shows Empire and Insecure.

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Issue 29 includes fiction by Berlin Prize winner and NEA Fellow V.V. Ganeshananthan, as well as relative newcomers Kimberly Garza, Maria Kuznetsova, Sam Simas, and Jennifer Wortman. Nonfiction by Best American Essays and Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses contributor Paul Crenshaw and experimental lyric prose writer Debra Di Blasi. Poetry by Roethke Memorial Prize winner and Guggenheim Fellow David Baker, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winner Martha Collins, Rome Prize winner Mark Halliday, Kate Tufts Discovery Award winner Janice N. Harrington, Jake Adam York Prize winner Brooke Matson, NEA Fellows Kaveh Bassiri and Matt Morton, Cité Internationale des Arts Fellow Jacques J. Rancourt, Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award winner Natasha Sajé, as well as Jan Beatty, TR Brady, Jenna Le, Samantha Lê, John A. Nieves, Roy White, and many others. Translation Folios featuring short fiction by Galician writer Xavier Queipo, translated by Jacob Rogers; and poetry by Catalan poet Gemma Gorga, translated by Sharon Dolin; Chinese dissident poet Shen Haobo, translated by Liang Yuing; and Slovenian poet Aleš Šteger, translated by Brian Henry. The cover features work by Denver-based artist Michael Gadlin, who was educated at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, and whose work has been shown all over Denver, as well as in New York City and France. Gadlin is represented by K Contemporary Gallery in Denver.

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A surprising friendship develops between Eugenie, an escapee from the French Revolution, and Hannah, a Quaker girl, when they unite in the cause against slavery in this adventuresome tale of true nobility set amidst the rugged, eighteenth-century, Pennsylvania wilderness. Fifteen-year-old Eugenie de La Roque and her family barely escape the French Revolution with their lives. Along with several other noble families, they sail to America, where French Azilium, as the area came to be known, is being carved out of the rugged wilderness of Pennsylvania. Hannah Kimbrell is a young Quaker who has been chosen to help prepare French Azilum for the arrival of the aristocrats. In this wild place away from home and the memories they hold dear, Eugenie and Hannah find more in common than they first realize. With much to learn from each other, the girls unite to help free several slaves from their tyrannical French owner, a dangerous scheme that requires personal sacrifice in exchange for the slaves' freedom. A story of friendship against all odds, Waiting for the Queen is a loving portrait of the values of a young America, and a reminder that true nobility is more than a royal title.

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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.

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Winner of a Wisconsin Library Association "Outstanding Achievement Award" What is the deep web? A locked door. A tool for oppression and for revolution. “An emptying drain, driven by gravity.” And in Patrick Johnson’s Gatekeeper—selected by Khaled Mattawa as the winner of the 2019 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry—it is the place where connection is darkly transfigured by distance and power. So we learn as Johnson’s speaker descends into his inferno, his Virgil a hacker for whom “nothing to stop him is reason enough to keep going,” his Beatrice the elusive Anon, another faceless user of the deep web. Here is unnameable horror—human trafficking, hitmen, terrorism recruitment. And here, too, is the lure of the beloved. But gone are the orderly circles of hell. Instead, Johnson’s map of the deep web is recursive and interrogatory, drawing inspiration and forms from the natural world and from science, as his speaker attempts to find a stable grasp on the complexities of this exhilarating and frightening digital world. Spooky and spare, Gatekeeper is a striking debut collection and a suspenseful odyssey for these troubled times.

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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.”

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Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, The Milk Hours is an elegant debut that searches widely to ask what it means to exist in a state of loss. “We lived overlooking the walls overlooking the cemetery.” So begins the title poem of this collection, whose recursive temporality is filled with living, grieving things, punctuated by an unseen world of roots, bodies, and concealed histories. Like a cemetery, too, The Milk Hours sets unlikely neighbors alongside each other: Hegel and Murakami, Melville and the Persian astronomer al-Sufi, enacting a transhistorical poetics even as it brims with intimacy. These are poems of frequent swerves and transformations, which never stray far from an engagement with science, geography, art, and aesthetics, nor from the dream logic that motivates their incessant investigations. Indeed, while John James begins with the biographical—the haunting loss of a father in childhood, the exhausted hours of early fatherhood—the questions that emerge from his poetic synthesis are both timely and universal: what is it to be human in an era where nature and culture have fused? To live in a time of political and environmental upheaval, of both personal and public loss? How do we make meaning, and to whom—or what—do we turn, when such boundaries so radically collapse?

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"That's the magic of this book—the way Adam Clay, line after line, enacts the mind on the page." —MAGGIE SMITH To Make Room for the Sea reckons with the notion that nothing in this world is permanent. Led by an introspective speaker, these poems examine a landscape that resists full focus, and conclude that “it’s easier to love what we don’t know.” “I hold this leaf I think / you should see, but I can’t quite / say why,” Adam Clay writes, as he navigates a variety of both personal and ecological fixations: disembodied bullfrog croaks, the growth of his child, a computer’s dreaded blue screen of death. The observations in To Make Room for the Sea convey both grief for the Anthropocene and hope for the future. The poems read like field notes from someone who knows the world and hopes to know it differently. On the precipice of great change and restructured perspective, Clay’s poems linger in “the second between taking in a vision and processing it,” in the moment when the world is less a familiar system and more a palette of colors and potential. To Make Room for the Sea delights as much as it mourns. It looks forward as much as it reflects. Deft and hopeful, the poems in this collection gently encourage us to take another look at a world “only some strange god might have thought up / in a drunken stumble.”

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Incantatory, intimate, and incendiary, the poems of this award-winning debut are filled with explosive wit and humor like "a knife you don't see coming." A kaleidoscopic intelligence flows through Beautiful Zero, embracing forms of culture high and low in effort to finding meaning in the chaos. Poems about Shark Week and college football sit beside Roman Polanski and biting critiques of modern war. A series of poems set in a Kaiser Permanente hospital tear into the world of privatized health care while simultaneously charting a story of love in the face of catastrophe. Yet even at her most surreal, Willoughby always finds the pulsing heart at the core of the poem. She embraces what she cannot understand about both the world and herself because after all, "Nothing is as random as they say it is. / You were born the weirdo that you are."

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Moving from the mundane to the profound, first through observation of fact and matter, then shifting perspective, engaging a deeper sense of self, these poems re-imagine things great and small, making us care deeply about the world around us. In this cultivated and intricately crafted collection, Sally Keith shows the self as a crucible of force--that which compels us to exert ourselves upon the world, and meanwhile renders us vulnerable to it. Force by which a line unfurls--as in Robert Smithson's colossal Spiral Jetty--or leads with forward motion--a train hurdling along the west-reaching railroad; Edweard Muybridge's photographic reels charting animal and human locomotion. With poems remarkable in their clarity, captivating in their matter-of-factness, Keith examines the impossible and inevitable privacy of being a person in the world, meanwhile negotiating an inexorable pull toward the places we call home--one we alternately try and fail to resist.

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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.”

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His arresting ninth collection of poems, Eric Pankey's Trace locates itself at a threshold between faith and doubt--between the visible and the invisible, the say-able and the ineffable, the physical and the metaphysical. Also a map of the poet's journey into a deep depression, these poems confront one man's struggle to overcome depression's smothering weight and presence. And with remarkable clarity and complexity, Trace charts the poet's attempt to be inspired, to breathe again, to give breath and life to words. Ever solemn, ever existential, Pankey's poems find us at our most vulnerable, the moment when we as humans--believers and nonbelievers alike--must ultimately pause to question the uncertain fate of our souls.

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“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.

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“Hands-down one of the most beautiful books of the year.” —NPRFrom beloved, award-winning poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil comes a debut work of nonfiction—a collection of essays about the natural world, and the way its inhabitants can teach, support, and inspire us.As a child, Nezhukumatathil called many places home: the grounds of a Kansas mental institution, where her Filipina mother was a doctor; the open skies and tall mountains of Arizona, where she hiked with her Indian father; and the chillier climes of western New York and Ohio. But no matter where she was transplanted—no matter how awkward the fit or forbidding the landscape—she was able to turn to our world’s fierce and funny creatures for guidance.“What the peacock can do,” she tells us, “is remind you of a home you will run away from and run back to all your life.” The axolotl teaches us to smile, even in the face of unkindness; the touch-me-not plant shows us how to shake off unwanted advances; the narwhal demonstrates how to survive in hostile environments. Even in the strange and the unlovely, Nezhukumatathil finds beauty and kinship. For it is this way with wonder: it requires that we are curious enough to look past the distractions in order to fully appreciate the world’s gifts.Warm, lyrical, and gorgeously illustrated by Fumi Nakamura, World of Wonders is a book of sustenance and joy.

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Gutenberg's invention of movable type in the fifteenth century introduced an era of mass communication that permanently altered the structure of society. While publishing has been buffeted by persistent upheaval and transformation ever since, the current combination of technological developments, market pressures, and changing reading habits has led to an unprecedented paradigm shift in the world of books. Bringing together a wide range of perspectives -- industry veterans and provocateurs, writers, editors, and digital mavericks -- this invaluable collection reflects on the current situation of literary publishing, and provides a road map for the shifting geography of its future: How do editors and publishers adapt to this rapidly changing world? How are vibrant public communities in the Digital Age created and engaged? How can an industry traditionally dominated by white men become more diverse and inclusive? Mindful of the stakes of the ongoing transformation, Literary Publishing in the 21st Century goes beyond the usual discussion of 'print vs. digital' to uncover the complex, contradictory, and increasingly vibrant personalities that will define the future of the book.

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Spanning one year of the author's life, I Will Not Leave You Comfortless is the intimate memoir of a boy's coming to consciousness in small-town Missouri, from a writer who "is known for beautifully expressive and strikingly lucid prose" (Thisbe Nissen). 1984 is the year that greets Jackson with first loves, first losses, and a break from the innocence of boyhood that will never be fully repaired. The seeming security of family is at once and forever shaken by the life-altering events of that pivotal year. Through tenderhearted, steadfast prose--redolent of the glories of outdoor life on the family farm--Jackson recalls the deeply sensual wonders of his rural Midwestern childhood--bicycle rides in September sunlight; the horizon vanishing behind tall grasses. Reanimating stories both heart wrenching and humorous, tragic and triumphant, Jackson weaves past, present, and future into the rich Missouri landscape. With storytelling informed by profound sense of place and an emotional memory remarkably sound, Jackson stands poised to join the ranks of renowned memoirists.

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Over the course of six critically acclaimed books--including a compelling meditation on Moby-Dick--Dan Beachy-Quick has established himself as "one of America's most significant young poets" (Lyn Hejinian). In Wonderful Investigations, Beachy-Quick broaches "a hazy line, a faulty boundary" between our daily world and one rich with wonder; a magical world in which, through his work as a writer, Beachy-Quick participates with a singular combination of critical intelligence and lyricism. Touching on the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Proust, and Plato, among others, Beachy-Quick outlines the problem of duality in modern thought--the separation of the mind and body, word and referent, intelligence and mystery, human and natural--and makes the case for a fuller kind of nature poetry, one that strives to overcome this false separation, and to celebrate the notion that "wonder is the fact that the world has never ceased to be real."

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Stately oaks, ivy-covered walls, the opposite sex -- these are the things that likely come to mind for most Americans when they think about the "nature" of college. But the real nature of college is hidden in plain sight: it's flowing out of the keg, it's woven into the mascots on our T-shirts. Engaging in a deep and richly entertaining study of "campus ecology," The Nature of College explores one day in the life of the average student, questioning what "natural" is and what "common sense" is really good for and weighing the collective impacts of the everyday. In the end, this fascinating, highly original book rediscovers and repurposes the great and timeless opportunity presented by college: to study the American way of life, and to develop a more sustainable, better way to live.

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The Suspension of Time is a collection of essays on Dinnerstein's masterpiece, The Fulbright Triptych. It includes writing by an extraordinarily diverse range of contributors, from the Pulitzer-Prize-winning novelist Jhumpa Lahiri 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, and demonstrate the rich potential for collaboration between visual, literary, musical, and other arts.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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When Celia Canby -- Kate's niece, Bess's mother, and Harriet's cousin -- is killed in a car accident, it's up to Kate and Harriet to raise Bess. Ten years later, on the day of the accident, the local newspaper in Harvester, MN, dredges up the story of the accident for a careless "Way Back When" piece, subjecting the women to another round of grief. Kate, arthritic and stuck far away from the farm she loves, is concerned about Bess. Headstrong and closed off, Bess yearns to escape Harvester before she "goes bad." But when she begins to trace the same path of mistakes her mother made -- a risky relationship with a local married man -- everything seems on the verge of falling apart. In a novel that celebrates the power of what a woman can do, What A Woman Must Do asks timeless questions about love and loss: How does our history define us? How can we let go of it? Should we?

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An astonishing novel of epic ambition, Vandal Love--winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best first book in 2007--follows generations of a unique French-Canadian family across North America and through the twentieth century. A family curse--a genetic trick resulting from centuries of hardship--causes the Herve children to be born either giants or runts. Book One follows the giants' line, exploring Jude Herve's career as a boxer in Georgia and Louisiana in the 1960s, his escape from that brutal life alone with his baby daughter Isa, and her eventual decision to enter into a strange, chaste marriage with a much older man. Book Two traces a different kind of life entirely, as the runts of the family discover that their power lies in a kind of unifying love. Francois seeks the identity of his missing father for years, while his own son, Harvey, flees from modern society into spiritual quests. But none of the Herves can abandon their longing for a place where they might find others like themselves. In assured and mystically powerful prose, Deni Y. Bechard tells a wide-ranging, spellbinding story of a family trying to create an identity in an unwelcoming landscape. Imbued throughout with a deep sensitivity to the physical world, Vandal Love is a breathtaking literary debut about the power of love to create and destroy--in our lives, and in our history.

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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 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.

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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 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.

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A People Magazine "Best New Book of the Month"A Millions Most Anticipated Book of 2024“I’m in awe of Chris La Tray’s storytelling. Becoming Little Shell creates a multilayered narrative from threads of personal, family, community, tribal, and national histories.”—Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding SweetgrassGrowing up in Montana, Chris La Tray always identified as Indian. Despite the fact that his father fiercely denied any connection, he found Indigenous people alluring, often recalling his grandmother’s consistent mention of their Chippewa heritage.When La Tray attended his grandfather’s funeral as a young man, he finally found himself surrounded by relatives who obviously were Indigenous. “Who were they?” he wondered, and “Why was I never allowed to know them?” Combining diligent research and compelling conversations with authors

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“Beautifully written, The Eighth Moon uses a very light touch to probe the most essential, unresolvable questions of belief, kinship, fidelity, history, and identity.”—Chris KrausA rebellion, guns, and murder. When Jennifer Kabat moves to the Catskills, she has no idea it was the site of the Anti-Rent War, an early episode of American rural populism. As she forges friendships with her new neighbors and explores the countryside on logging roads and rutted lanes—finding meadows dotted with milkweed in bloom, saffron salamanders, a blood moon rising over Munsee, Oneida, and Mohawk land—she slowly learns of the 1840s uprising, when poor tenant farmers fought to redistribute their landlords’ vast estates. In the farmers’ socialist dreams, she discovers connections to her parents’ collectivist values,

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A NEW YORK TIMES BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2018 A WORLD LITERATURE TODAY NOTABLE TRANSLATION In the beginning, the world is spoken into existence with one word: “Earth.” There are no inhabitants, and no sun—only the broad sky, silent sea, and sovereign Framer and Shaper. Then come the twin heroes Hunahpu and Xbalanque. Wielding blowguns, they begin a journey to hell and back, ready to confront the folly of false deities as well as death itself, in service to the world and to humanity. This is the story of the Mayan Popol Vuh, “the book of the woven mat,” one of the only epics indigenous to the Americas. Originally sung and chanted, before being translated into prose—and now, for the first time, translated back into verse by Michael Bazzett—this is a story of the generative power of language. A story that asks not only Where did you come from? but How might you live again? A story that, for the first time in English, lives fully as “the phonetic rendering of a living pulse.” By turns poetic and lucid, sinuous and accessible, this striking new translation of The Popol Vuh—the first in the Seedbank series of world literature—breathes new life into an essential tale.

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Winner of the 2021 Maine Literary Award in Poetry A Literary Hub “Most Anticipated Book of 2020” A meticulously detailed catalogue of ordinary people performing acts of extraordinary violence, The Century charts an awakening to structures of dominance and violence. In the tradition of witness poetry, The Century tugs apart the quotidian horrors required to perpetuate acts of violence like the Holocaust, the deployment of nuclear weapons in Japan and Iraq, American slavery and its lingering aftermath. When Éireann Lorsung writes of death and dying, of “bodies in the fields becoming the fields,” it’s the simplicity that’s most haunting. After a fire, “some of their skin moved off of them as they ran, a very / simple melting…” But these poems don’t just witness; they also resist and serve as models for resistant lives. Pushing back against form and grammar, constructions of time and geography, Lorsung traces decades of technological, geopolitical, and cultural shifts through generations and across continents as networks of dominance continue to be stubbornly upheld. The Century is evasive but thorny, splintering in the mind. This collection is a reminder that the arrival of each new century, decade, or year brings with it an invitation to join ongoing movements of resistance, air pockets of hope in the waters that we all swim or drown in.

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With intelligence and crystalline clarity, a chorus of female voices speaks through the poems in Her book, Eireann Lorsung's inspired second collection. From the poet who brought us Music For Landing Planes By, Eireann Lorsung's luminous voice is distilled through multiple unnamed female speakers in this, her second collection. Full of youth, wonder, and imagination, Her book crosses distances and generations to celebrate the lives of women, their individual and shared experiences, and the bonds that bring them together. This is also a book about translation (of experience into art, of knowledge across time and space) and conversation (with, for instance, work by Kiki Smith, widely known as a feminist artist). Lorsung writes additionally about her time spent in England and friendships she formed with women there. Together these poems comprise both her book (Lorsung's), and hers (encompassing all who identify with that word).

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