Books in the Made in Michigan Writers Series series

In How Other People Make Love, Thisbe Nissen chronicles the lives and choices of people questioning the heteronormative institution of marriage. Not best-served by established conventions and conventional mores, these people-young, old, gay, straight, Midwestern, coastal-are finding their own paths in learning who they are and how they want to love and be loved, even when those paths must be blazed through the unknown. Concerning husbands and wives, lovers and leavers, Nissen's stories explore our search for connection and all the ways we undercut it, unwittingly and intentionally, when we do find it. How do we hold ourselves together-to function, work, and survive-while endlessly yearning to be undone, unraveled, and laid bare, however untenable and excruciating? How Other People Make Love contains nine stories. "e;Win's Girl"e; features a single woman who works at an Iowa slaughterhouse and uses the insurance money from a car accident to update the electric system in her dead parents' old house, only to be unwittingly embroiled with a shady electrician who ultimately forces her to stand up for herself. In "e;Home Is Where the Heart Gives Out and We Arouse the Grass,"e; a young woman flees after cheating on her husband and winds up at a Nebraska roadside motel populated by participants in a regional dog show who help her decide what to do next. In "e;Unity Brought Them Together,"e; a young man heads to his favorite New York coffee shop intending to finish the Christmas cards his vacationing fiance insists on sending, but winds up meeting another displaced young Midwestern man there and going home with him instead. All these stories explore the question, "e;how do we love?"e; as well as the answers we find, discard, follow, banish, and cling to in all our humanness and desperation. How Other People Make Love asserts that there aren't right and wrong ways to love; there are only our very complicated and contradictory human hearts, minds, bodies, and desires-all searching for something, whether we know what that is or not. These are stories for anyone who has ever loved or been loved.

In a thrilling interconnected narrative, You're in the Wrong Place presents characters reaching for transcendence from a place they cannot escape. In turns elegiac and harrowing, You're in the Wrong Place blends lyric intensity with philosophical eroticism to create a singular, powerful vision of contemporary American life.

An ecopoet whose writing shows her advocacy for natural resources, in this collection Alison Swan calls the reader to witness, appreciate, and sustain this world before it becomes too late. These poems were written out of an impulse to track down wisdom in the open air, outside of the noisy world of cars and commerce.

If you thought the suburbs were boring, think again. Kelly Fordon's I Have the Answer artfully mixes the fabulist with the workaday and illuminates relationships and characters with crisp, elegant prose and dark wit. The stories in Fordon's latest collection are disquieting, humorous, and thought-provoking.

A collection of poetry by award-winning Ojibwe author Lois Beardslee. Much of the book centres around Native people of the Great Lakes but it has a universal relevance to modern indigenous people worldwide.

Beautifully rendered and rippling with family dysfunction, secrets, deaths, drunks, and old resentments, Shonda Buchanan's memoir is an inspiring story that explores her family's legacy of being African Americans with American Indian roots and how they dealt with not just society's ostracization but the consequences of this dual inheritance.

Depending on dialect, the Anishinaabemowin word "e;weweni"e; expresses thanks, exactitude, ease, and sincerity. In addition, the word for "e;relatives"e; is "e;nindenwemaaganag"e;: those whose "e;enewewe,"e; or voices, sound familiar. In Weweni, poet Margaret Noodin brings all of these meanings to bear in a unique bilingual collection. Noodin's warm and perceptive poems were written first in the Modern Anishinaabemowin double-vowel orthography and appear translated on facing pages in English. From planetary tracking to political contrasts, stories of ghosts, and messages of trees, the poems in Weweni use many images to speak to the interconnectedness of relationships, moments of difficulty and joy, and dreams and cautions for the future. As poems move from Anishinaabemowin to English, the challenge of translation offers multiple levels of meaning-English meanings found in Anishinaabe words long as rivers and knotted like nets, English approximations that bend the dominant language in new directions, and sets of signs and ideas unable to move from one language to another. In addition to the individual dialogues played out beween Noodin's poems, the collection as a whole demonstrates a fruitful and respectful dialogue between languages and cultures. Noodin's poems will be proof to students and speakers of Anishinaabemowin that the language can be a vital space for modern expression and, for those new to the language, a lyric invitation to further exploration. Anyone interested in poetry or linguistics will enjoy this one-of-a-kind volume.