Search results for ""Milkweed Editions""

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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Chris Dombrowski was playing a numbers game: two passions--poetry and fly-fishing; two children, one of them in utero; and an income hovering perilously close to zero. Enter, at this particularly challenging moment, a miraculous email: can't go, it's all paid for, just book a flight to Miami. Thus began a journey that would lead to the Bahamas and to David Pinder, a legendary bonefishing guide. Bonefish are prized for their elusiveness and their tenacity. And no one was better at hunting them than Pinder, a Bahamian whose accuracy and patience were virtuosic. He knows what the fish think, said one fisherman, before they think it. By the time Dombrowski meets Pinder, however, he has been abandoned by the industry he helped build. With cataracts from a lifetime of staring at the water and a tiny severance package after forty years of service, he watches as the world of his beloved bonefish is degraded by tourists he himself did so much to attract. But as Pinder's stories unfold, Dombrowski discovers a profound integrity and wisdom in the guide's life.

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In My Green Manifesto, David Gessner embarks on a rough-and-tumble journey down Boston's Charles River, searching for the soul of a new environmentalism. With a tragically leaky canoe, a broken cell phone, a cooler of beer, and the environmental planner Dan Driscoll in tow, Gessner grapples with the stereotype of the environmentalist as an overzealous, puritanical mess. But as Dan recounts his own story of transforming the famously polluted Charles into an urban haven for wildlife and wild people, the vision of a new sort of eco-champion begins to emerge: someone who falls in love with a forgotten space, and then fights like hell for it. Considering everything from Ed Abbey's legacy to Jimmy Carter's sweater, Gessner points toward a scrappy environmentalism that, despite all odds, just might change the world.

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The creek behind John Daniel’s home in western Oregon disappears underground in the summer months. Using this creek as a metaphor, Daniel reflects on his own seasonal changes — from days as a student on LSD, rock climber, logger, and railroad worker, to life as a writer attentive to the “evidence of the unseen.” Winter Creek is John Daniel’s disarmingly honest story of his restless, rootless, disaffected youth, looking for meaning in drugs and an active outdoor life in the West. From time spent fishing, climbing, and making a living logging—as well as through friendships with writers including William Stafford and Wallace Stegner—Daniel developed a personal and artistic ethos based on a long view of evolution and the glory of living with one’s senses and an open mind. Daniel also speaks for the need to value small farmers and ranchers—“authentic human communities” that are as threatened as the plants and animals environmentalists strive to protect. “[Daniel’s voice is] fresh, self-reflective, and free of cant ... shows considerable originality, force, and descriptive art.” — Kirkus Reviews on John Daniel's The Trail Home

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“A full-bodied literary achievement bustling with sweat, regret, and sound.” —KIESE LAYMON Ndiya Grayson returns to her childhood home of Chicago as a young professional, but even her high-end job in a law office can’t protect her from half-repressed memories of childhood trauma. One evening, vulnerable and emotionally disarrayed, she goes out and meets her equal and opposite: Shame Luther, a no-nonsense construction worker by day and a self-taught piano player by night. The love story that ensues propels them on an unforgettable journey from Chicago’s South Side to the coast of Kenya as they navigate the turbulence of long-buried pasts and an uncertain future. A stirring novel tuned to the clash between soul music’s vision of our essential responsibility to each other and a world that breaks us down and tears us apart, Another Kind of Madness is an indelible tale of human connection.

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From the author of Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse and The Cape Ann comes a new tale of resilient womanhood in Harvester, Minnesota. Growing up in early twentieth-century Illinois, Ruby Drake is a happy child. But one winter’s night, her beloved parents perish in an accident—and suddenly Ruby finds herself penniless and nearly alone in the world. Her new path eventually takes her to Harvester, where she is lucky enough to find work on the welcoming Schoonover farm. Kind Emma, forward-thinking Henry, and their hired men—ambitious Dennis and reserved Jake—soon become a second family to the orphaned teenager. At a historical moment when young women are expected to be focused on courtship and marriage, the industrious, bright Ruby searches for opportunities to expand her horizons at every step. Mastering her responsibilities on the farm. Learning to smoke cigarettes. Borrowing books from the local lending library, reading devotedly and expansively: mythology, romance, poetry. And falling in love with her married neighbor, Roland: “the most beautiful man—maybe in the world.” But when Ruby is asked to care for Roland’s wife in the wake of tragedy, she is torn between duty and passion, between what has been her lot and what could be. Jane Eyre set in Faith Sullivan’s “reliably inviting world” (Wall Street Journal), Ruby & Roland is a story of relationships—friendship, romance, and the families we are born with and create—and of one woman’s journey of selfhood on the prairie.

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Fierce, searing, and darkly comical, Garriga's debut collection of short-short fiction depicts historical and imagined duels, re-envisioning in a flash the competing points of motivation--courage and cowardice, honor and vengeance--that lead individuals to risk it all. In this compact collection, "settling the score" provides a fascinating apparatus for exploring foundational civilizing ideas. Notions of courage, cowardice, and revenge course through Michael Garriga's flash fiction pieces, each one of which captures a duel's decisive moment from three distinct perspectives: opposing accounts from the individual duelists, followed by the third account of a witness. In razor-honed language, the voices of the duelists take center stage, training a spotlight on the litany of misguided beliefs and perceptions that lead individuals into such conflicts. From Cain and Abel to Andrew Jackson and Charles Dickenson; from John Henry and the steam drill to an alcoholic fighting the bottle: the cumulative effect of these powerful pieces is a probing and disconcerting look at humankind's long-held notions of pride, honor, vengeance, and satisfaction. Meticulously crafted by Garriga, and with stunning illustrations by Tynan Kerr, The Book of Duels is a unique and remarkable debut.

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Full of cryptic twists, philosophical quandaries, and fabulist turns, J. C. Hallman's stories elucidate an intuitive understanding of the human condition. An alienated young man discovers the meaning of love in the pages of the biology textbook The Conjugal Cyst, and in the arms of two increasingly unavailable older nurses. As his father deserts his mother, who is subsequently encroached upon by his eligible English teacher, an adolescent boy constructs a wicker man in the garage, to repel successors and to summon his own adult identity. A mother and son witness a father's backyard fling with a disturbed neighbor who has pruned a leafy cave out of the dividing hedge. A young couple's romantic consummation is repeatedly interrupted by the intrusion of a narrator commenting on the phenomenon of eroticism. Richly allusive, these literate and literary stories explore modern riddles with no easy answers.

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Every winter, Tommy Jack McMorsey watches the meteor showers in northern Minnesota. On the long haul from Texas to Minnesota, Tommy encounters a deluded Japanese tourist determined to find the buried ransom money from the movie Fargo. When the Japanese tourist dies of exposure in Tommy Jack's care, a media storm erupts and sets off a series of journeys into Tommy Jack's past as he remembers the horrors of Vietnam, a love affair, and the suicide of his closest friend, Fred Howkowski. Exploring with great insight and wit the ways images, stereotypes, and depictions intersect with, Extra Indians offers a powerful glimpse into contemporary Native American life.

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Exploring the paranoia and bravura of the modern American male, these powerful novellas depict a realm marked by faltering blunders, misguided intentions, and the fear of failure. At once comical and terrifying, “I Am Death, or Bartleby the Mobster” charts the slumped career of a muckraking journalist, Jack, who has managed to attract the attention of Frank Fini, one of Chicago’s great mob bosses. Fini wants to hire Jack to ghostwrite his autobiography, A Boy’s First Book of Mobsters, and so begins a journey through hell as Jack attempts to restore his career, revive his ex-wife’s interest in him, and stay one step ahead of Fini and the mob. “Peasants,” alternately satirical and tender, takes as its setting the modern corporate office, in this case a publisher of guides for users of geographic information systems. Walter Rasmussen has developed a few successful books and his future looks bright. But as a special project begins to falter and he finds his position in jeopardy, he begins to suspect his colleagues of sabotaging his career. As he did with Visigoth, Gary Amdahl demonstrates that he is our most adept and honest guide into the psyche of the modern American male.

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“From the summer of my twelfth year I carry a series of images more vivid and lasting than any others of my boyhood and indelible beyond all attempts the years make to erase or fade them… “ So begins David Hayden’s story of what happened in Montana in 1948. The events of that cataclysmic summer permanently alter twelve-year-old David’s understanding of his family: his father, a small-town sheriff; his remarkably strong mother; David’s uncle Frank, a war hero and respected doctor; and the Haydens’ Sioux housekeeper, Marie Little Soldier, whose revelations turn the family’s life upside down as she relates how Frank has been molesting his female Indian patients. As their story unravels around David, he learns that truth is not what one believes it to be, that power is abused, and that sometimes one has to choose between family loyalty and justice.

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Visigoth is a portrait of the American male—gritty, violent, and fascinating. The protagonists in this collection of stories come from all walks of life—hockey players, middle managers, political hopefuls, and wayward husbands—but all share a tendency to turn towards violence when life begins spinning out of control. In "The Flyweight," an all-star high-school wrestler struggles with his own success and the expectations of others when he begins hearing voices after a schizophrenic breakdown. "Visigoth," the title story, depicts a college hockey player unable to understand that his relationship with an English professor is over. The novella "The Free Fall" focuses on a cycle of escalating violence in small farming and mining towns and the effect that it has on the main character and his family. Sharp, inquisitive, and witty, Visigoth challenges the reader to question the popular glory of violence in all its manifestations.

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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 27 is particularly international—even for Copper Nickel—and features an expansive folio of younger and less-established Irish and UK poets, including Irish poets Martin Dyar, Elaine Feeney, Victoria Kennefick, Conor O'Callaghan, Paul Perry, Stephen Sexton, Lorna Shaughnessy, and Jessica Traynor; and UK poets James Byrne, Vahni Capildeo, Manuela Moser, Sam Riviere, Zoë Brigley Thompson, and Chrissy Williams. The oldest poet in the folio was born in 1968; the youngest poets were born in the 1990s. Issue 27 also features three translation folios (which are a regular feature in Copper Nickel): (1) a group of five prose poems by Danish poet Carsten Rene Nielsen (b. 1966), translated and introduced by David Keplinger; (2) three longer poems by Mexican poet Cristina Rivera Garza (b. 1964), translated by Julia Leverone; and (3) four poems by Mauritian poet Khal Torabully (b. 1956), translated and introduced by Nancy Naomi Carlson. This issue also includes fiction by Farah Ali, Amy Stuber, Jyotsna Sreenivasan, and Jacinda Townsend. Nonfiction includes a personal essay on Günter Grass by poet and German translator Stuart Friebert, a lyric essay on hexes by Laughlin award winner Kathryn Nuernberger, and a lyric essay on hide-and-seek by Ira Sukrungruang. Poets in issue 27 include two-time Pushcart Prize winner T. R. Hummer, NEA Fellow Christopher Kempf, Kingsley Tufts Award winner John Koethe, Whitman Award winner Emily Skaja, Best American Poetry contributor Corey Van Landingham, Jenny Boychuk, Juan Morales, Paul Otremba, Paige Quiñones, Arthur Russell, Francis Santana, and Chelsea Wagenaar. The cover features work by Denver-based photographer Kristen Hatgi Sink.

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This 21st issue of Copper Nickel features poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including work by National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist James Richardson; Anisfield-Wolf Award recipient Martha Collins; Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award winner Jehanne Dubrow; Guggenheim Fellow Mark Halliday; NEA Fellows David Hernandez, Henry Israeli, and Kevin Prufer; PEN/O. Henry Prize recipient Polly Rosenwaike; James Laughlin Award winner Tony Hoagland; James Merrill Fellow Anna B. Sutton; Lambda Literary Award winner Julie Marie Wade; Lannan Foundation Fellow Ed Skoog; as well as a number of writers at earlier stages in their careers. The issue will also include three "Translation Folios" introducing and contextualizing for an American audience the Chinese poet Yi Lu, the Danish fiction writer Christina Hesselholdt, and three Uruguayan poets: Laura Cesarco Eglin, Circe Maia, and Karen Wild. The cover of Issue 21 features new work by renowned artist, musician, and composer Mark Mothersbaugh.

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From one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers, an urgent and essential collection of poems illuminating the visionary presence of Palestinians.Fady Joudah’s powerful sixth collection of poems opens with, “I am unfinished business,” articulating the ongoing pathos of the Palestinian people. A rendering of Joudah’s survivance, [...] speaks to Palestine’s daily and historic erasure and insists on presence inside and outside the ancestral land. Responding to the unspeakable in real time, Joudah offers multiple ways of seeing the world through a Palestinian lens—a world filled with ordinary desires, no matter how grand or tragic the details may be—and asks their reader to be changed by them. The sequences are meditations on a carousel: the past returns as the future is foretold. But “Repetition won’t guarantee wisdom,” Joudah writes,

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A vulnerable and honest collection of poems exploring lineage, love, and the pandemic, from one of the most acclaimed poets of his generation.“You are told to believe in one paradise / and then there is the paradise you come to know,” begins Rick Barot. What follows is an account of the rich and thorny valley between those poles. Moving the Bones dwells in liminal spaces—of love and memory, the pandemic’s singular domesticity, a serene cemetery of ancestral plots, dawn. In precise and tender verse, Barot captures the particularities of being in the middle of one’s life, reflecting on the joys and sorrows of the past and confronting the inevitabilities that lie ahead.For Barot, this presence of mind is an art of being lost in thought. “My mind has a slow metabolism, it is slow / to understand what anything means,” he confides, “but understands that if you look a

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"These stories are grounded in soul, a deep communion with the belief that we can—and must—rebuild our relationship with the planet.”—Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange ParadiseOtherworldly but remarkably familiar, ancestral but firmly rooted in alternate futures, these twelve innovative stories—winners of the Imagine 2200 climate fiction contest organized by Grist—offer a glimpse of a future built on sustainability, inclusivity, and justice. A beekeeper finds purpose and new love after collaborating on a bee-based warning system for floods. An Indian family preserves its traditions through food, dance, and the latest communication fads. After an oceanic rapture, a lone survivor adapts to living in a tree on a small island with a vulture he befriends. Flickers of hope, even joy, illuminate these alternate realities. Curated by Grist, the leading media organization dedicated to foregrounding stories of climat

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“The finest poems Holm has ever written.” —MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE In this collection of poems, Bill Holm—like a modern-day Walt Whitman bestriding America and the world—comments on the waywardness and promise of the human species. Playing the Black Piano reflects Holm’s time in Iceland (his ancestral home), his ongoing love affair with music, a friend’s death from AIDS, and his bold reactions to the world around him. Moving from Oregon forests to the deserts around Tuscon, from the endless marketing of long-distance telephone service to the experience of undergoing an MRI, these poems speak of Holm’s full embrace of the world and his passion for living well. This is a wise, musical collection from one of Minnesota’s most treasured poets.

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“But hell, I do like to write letters. Much easier than writing books.” And write letters Edward Abbey—“the Thoreau of the American West” (Washington Post)—did. At once incendiary and insightful, cantankerous and profoundly perceptive, Abbey was a singular American writer and cult hero, as famous for books like Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang as he was infamous for the persona of “Cactus Ed.” A true iconoclast with a rich sense of humor, his polemics and salvos—Wallace Stegner once likened Abbey to the “stinger of a scorpion”—were not limited to any one arena. Abbey’s postcards and letters, legendary during his lifetime, convey the fullness of the man and reveal, along with his wisdom and savage wit, a tender side seldom seen before. For readers new to Abbey, this collection is an awe-inspiring introduction to the man and his works. And for devoted fans, the letters chronicle his evolution as an authentic American voice in the wilderness.

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From Jennifer duBois, “one of a handful of living American novelists who can comprehend both the long arc of history and the minute details that animate it” (Karan Mahajan) and “a writer of thrilling psychological precision” (Justin Torres), comes a gripping new novel.In 2001, a few months after the death of her husband, Angela is devastated when she is ejected from her graduate program in linguistics at Harvard University. Soon after, she suffers a miscarriage. Spinning and raw, and with suppressed unresolved trauma, the young widow and her four-year-old child move into her mother’s house.Trained with an understanding of spoken language as the essential foundation of thought, Angela finds underpaid work at the Center, a fledgling organization utilizing an experimental therapy aimed at helping nonspeaking patients with motor impairments. Through the Center, Angela begins to work closely with Sam, a twenty-eight-year-old patient who has been confined to his bedroom for most of his life. Sam quickly takes to the technology—and so does Angela. Her once deeply philosophical interest in language comes vividly to life through her interactions with Sam. Angela becomes intensely drawn to him, and their relationship soon turns intimate.When Sam’s family discovers their relationship, they intervene and bring charges. As Angela tells her story from prison in the form of an unrepentant plea, we are plunged into the inner workings of her mind as she rejects all else in pursuit of a more profound understanding of language and humanity. As the sole narrator and perspective giver, Angela’s understanding pushes and pulls us into ambiguity, and a Nabokovian hall of mirrors emerges as she tumbles deeper and deeper into obsession.Provocative and profound in its exploration of the basis of humanity, this is an extraordinary novel from one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers.

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The newest entry in the Multiverse series, Tressing Motions at the Edge of Mistakes is a debut collection activated by sampling, troubling, and trespassing.This is a book of what its teenage nonspeaking autistic author Imane Boukaila, calls “tacit treasures.” Where manifestos encounter poems and raps encounter essays, the lyric constellations that mark this debut sing in opposition to those “troubled-abled” who would coerce and control disabled lives.Boukaila offers another way: her “LOL tressed philosophy,” her truth. This liberatory philosophy exists at the periphery, thresholding, in all the places where life opens toward neurodivergent revolution. “Treasures thrive in open spreading spaces,” she writes. From the muddy streams shimmering with trout, to the space storms in the starry skies, to the tressing that exists between minds,

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A New York Times Book Review "New & Noteworthy Poetry" Selection A Library Journal "Poetry Title to Watch 2021" A Chicago Review of Books "Poetry Collection to Read in 2021 A Reader's Digest "14 Amazing Black Poets to Know About Now" Selection A Books Are Magic "Recommended Reading" Selection “Sometimes,” writes Michael Kleber-Diggs writes in this winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, “everything reduces to circles and lines.” In these poems, Kleber-Diggs names delight in the same breath as loss. Moments suffused with love—teaching his daughter how to drive; watching his grandmother bake a cake; waking beside his beloved to ponder trumpet mechanics—couple with moments of wrenching grief—a father’s life ended by a gun; mourning children draped around their mother’s waist; Freddie Gray’s death in police custody. Even in the refuge-space of dreams, a man calls the police on his Black neighbor. But Worldly Things refuses to “offer allegiance” to this centuries-old status quo. With uncompromising candor, Kleber-Diggs documents the many ways America systemically fails those who call it home while also calling upon our collective potential for something better. “Let’s create folklore side-by-side,” he urges, asking us to aspire to a form of nurturing defined by tenderness, to a kind of community devoted to mutual prosperity. “All of us want,” after all, “our share of light, and just enough rainfall.” Sonorous and measured, the poems of Worldly Things offer needed guidance on ways forward—toward radical kindness and a socially responsible poetics.

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Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Jackson Holbert’s Winter Stranger is a solemn record of addiction and the divided affections we hold for the landscapes that shape us.In the cold, seminal countryside of eastern Washington, a boy puts a bullet through his skull in a high school parking lot. An uncle crushes oxycodone into “a thousand red granules.” Hawks wheel above a dark, indifferent river. “I left that town / forever,” Holbert writes, but its bruises appear everywhere, in dreams of violent men and small stars, the ghosts of friends and pills. These poems incite a complex emotional discourse on what it means to leave—if it’s ever actually possible, or if our roots only grow longer to accommodate the distance.Punctuated by recollections of loved ones consumed by their addictions, Winter Stranger also questions the capricious nature of memory, and poetry’s power to tame it. “I can make it all sound so beautiful. / You’ll barely notice that underneath / this poem there is a body / decaying into the American ground.” Meanwhile, the precious realities vanish—“your hair, your ears, your hands.”—leaving behind “the fucked up / trees,” the “long, cold river.” In verse both bleak and wishful, Holbert strikes a fine balance between his poetic sensibilities and the endemic cynicism of modern life.“It is clear now that there are no ends,” Holbert writes, “Just winters.” Though his poems bloom from hills heavy with springtime snow, his voice cuts through the cold, rich with dearly familiar longings: to not be alone, to honor our origins, to survive them.The Winter Stranger audiobook read by Jackson Holbert is available everywhere you listen to audiobooks.

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A marvelous debut novel exploring the fractures caused by the Partition of India, as well as the legacy and contemporary parallels of sectarian violence around the world.Lahore, British India. 1943. As World War rages, resentment of colonial rule grows, and with it acts of rebellion. Animated by idealistic dreams of an independent India, Chhote Nanu agrees to plant a bomb intended for the British superintendent of police. Some four years later, following a torturous imprisonment, Chhote flees the city as it descends into violence. Carrying the young son of his murdered wife through scenes of unspeakable bloodshed, he encounters his brother, Barre Nanu, the two of them caught between a vanishing past in the new nation of Pakistan and a profoundly uncertain future in India.Kanpur, India. 2002. Following the death of his grandfather, Barre Nanu, Karan Khati returns from New York to join his sister in their childhood home, which has been transformed by the embittered Chhote Nanu into a hostel for Hindu pilgrims. When their mother arrives from Delhi, Karan and Ila learn that their fathers were two different men—one Hindu, one Muslim—relationships with both of whom were doomed by familial bias and prejudice, the siblings resolve to reconnect, and to understand the painful twist and turns in the family’s story.Moving back and forth from the tumultuous years surrounding Partition to the era of renewed global sectarianism following 9/11, this extraordinary historical novel, “Tolstoyan in its scope” (Ha Jin), portrays a family and nations divided by the living legacy of colonialism. Richly evocative and timely, House of Caravans will endure in the ways only the best literature does.

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From Kingsley Tufts Award finalist Kathy Fagan comes Bad Hobby, a perceptive collection focused on memory, class, and might-have-beens.In a working-class family that considers sensitivity a “fatal diagnosis,” how does a child grow up to be a poet? What happens when a body “meant to bend & breed” opts not to, then finds itself performing the labor of care regardless? Why do we think our “common griefs” so singular? Bad Hobby is a hard-earned meditation on questions like these—a dreamscape speckled with swans, ghosts, and weather updates.Fagan writes with a kind of practical empathy, lamenting pain and brutality while knowing, also, their inevitability. A dementing father, a squirrel limp in the talons of a hawk, a “child who won’t ever get born”: with age, Fagan posits, the impact of ordeals like these changes. Loss becomes instructive. Solitude becomes a shared experience. “You think your one life precious—”And Bad Hobby thinks—hard. About lineage, about caregiving. About time. It paces “inside its head, gazing skyward for a noun or phrase to / shatter the glass of our locked cars & save us.” And it does want to save us, or at least lift us, even in the face of immense bleakness, or loneliness, or the body changing, failing. “Don’t worry, baby,” Fagan tells us, the sparrow at her window. “We’re okay.”

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Selected by Maggie Smith for the 2023 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, this debut collection of poems explores the aftermath of history’s most powerful forces: devotion, disaster, and us.Rooted in the Gulf Coast, A History of Half-Birds measures the line between love and ruin. Part poet, part anthropologist, Caroline Harper New digs into dark places—a cave, a womb, a hurricane—to trace how violence born of devotion manifests not only in our human relationships, but also in our connections to the natural and animal worlds. Everywhere in these pages, tenderness is coupled with brutality: a deer eats a baby bird, a lover restrains another. “I promised / a love poem,” New proclaims, then teaches us about the anglerfish, how it “attracts its mate / and prey with the same lure.”In New’s exceptional voice, familiar concepts take on a shade of the fantastic. A woman tas

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Selected by Victoria Chang as winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, John McCarthy’s Scared Violent Like Horses is a deeply personal examination of violent masculinity, driven by a yearning for more compassionate ways of being. McCarthy’s flyover country is populated by a family strangled by silence: a father drunk and mute in the passenger seat, a mother sinking into bed like a dish at the bottom of a sink, and a boy whose friends play punch-for-punch for fun. He shows us a boy struggling to understand pain carried down through generations and how quickly abandonment becomes a silent kind of violence; “how we deny each other, daily, so many chances to care,” and how “we didn’t know how to talk about loss, / so we made each other lose.” Constant throughout is the brutality of the Midwestern landscape that, like the people who inhabit it, turns out to be beautiful in its vulnerability: sedgegrass littered with plastic bags floating like ghosts, dilapidated houses with abandoned Fisher Price toys in the yard, and silos of dirt and rust under a sky that struggles to remember the ground below. With arresting lyricism and humility, Scared Violent Like Horses attends to the insecurities that hide at the heart of what’s been turned harsh, offering a smoldering but redemptive and tender view of the lost, looked over, and forgotten.

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John James Audubon is renowned for his masterpiece of natural history and art, The Birds of America, the first nearly comprehensive survey of the continent's birdlife. And yet few people understand, and many assume incorrectly, what sort of man he was. How did the illegitimate son of a French sea captain living in Haiti, who lied both about his parentage and his training, rise to become one of the greatest natural historians ever and the greatest name in ornithology? In Under a Wild Sky this Pulitzer Prize finalist, William Souder reveals that Audubon did not only compose the most famous depictions of birds the world has ever seen, he also composed a brilliant mythology of self. In this dazzling work of biography, Souder charts the life of a driven man who, despite all odds, became the historical figure we know today.

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“We may not relight the fires that used to burn in our villages, but we can carry the embers from those fires in our hearts and learn to light new fires in a new world.” Ojibwe tradition calls for fathers to walk their children through the world, sharing the ancient understanding “that we are all, animate and inanimate alike, living on the one pure breath with which the Creator gave life to the Universe.” In this new entry in the Seedbank series, an intimate series of letters to the six-year-old son from whom he was estranged, Richard Wagamese fulfills this traditional duty with grace and humility, describing his own path through life—separation from his family as a boy, substance abuse, incarceration, and ultimately the discovery of books and writing—and braiding this extraordinary story with the teachings of his people, in which animals were the teachers of human beings, until greed and a desire to control the more-than-human world led to anger, fear, and, eventually, profound alienation. At once a deeply moving memoir and a fascinating elucidation of a rich indigenous cosmology, Walking the Ojibwe Path is an unforgettable journey.

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Bonobos have captured the public imagination in recent years, due not least to their famously active sex lives. Less well known is the fact that these great apes don't kill their own kind, and that they share nearly 99% of our DNA. Their approach to building peaceful coalitions and sharing resources has much to teach us, particularly at a time when our violent ways have pushed them to the brink of extinction. Animated by a desire to understand bonobos and learn how to save them, acclaimed author Deni Ellis Bechard traveled into the Congo. Of Bonobos and Men is the account of this journey. Along the way, we see how partnerships between Congolese and Westerners, with few resources but a common purpose and respect for indigenous knowledge, have resulted in the protection of vast swaths of the rainforest. And we discover how small solutions--found through openness, humility, and the principle that "poverty does not equal ignorance"--are often most effective in tackling our biggest challenges. Combining elements of travelogue, journalism, and natural history, this incomparably rich book takes the reader not only deep into the Congo, but also into our past and future, revealing new ways to save the environment and ourselves.

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Finalist for the 2023 Minnesota Book AwardA sublimely elegant, fractured reckoning with the legacy and inheritance of suicide in one American family.In 2009, Juliet Patterson was recovering from a serious car accident when she learned her father had died by suicide. His death was part of a disturbing pattern in her family. Her father’s father had taken his own life; so had her mother’s. Over the weeks and months that followed, grieving and in physical pain, Patterson kept returning to one question: Why? Why had her family lost so many men, so many fathers, and what lay beneath the silence that had taken hold?In three graceful movements, Patterson explores these questions. In the winter of her father’s death, she struggles to make sense of the loss—sifting through the few belongings he left behind, looking to signs and symbols for meaning. As the spring thaw comes, she and her mother depart Minnesota for her father’s burial in her parents’ hometown of Pittsburg, Kansas. A once-prosperous town of promise and of violence, against people and the land, Pittsburg is now literally undermined by abandoned claims and sinkholes. There, Patterson carefully gathers evidence and radically imagines the final days of the grandfathers—one a fiery pro-labor politician, the other a melancholy businessman—she never knew. And finally, she returns to her father: to the haunting subjects of goodbyes, of loss, and of how to break the cycle.A stunning elegy that vividly enacts Emily Dickinson’s dictum to “tell it slant,” Sinkhole richly layers personal, familial, political, and environmental histories to provide not answers but essential, heartbreaking truth.

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