Books in the Made in Michigan Writers Series series

A short story collection that is distinctly Detroit. By touching on a number of romantic and sexual encounters that span the historical and temporal spaces of the city, each of these interconnected stories examines the obstacles an individual faces and the choices he or she makes in order to cope and survive in the changing urban landscape.

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.

These are not love poems in the abstract - the richness with which Naomi Long Madgett writes hints at the firsthand experience of a lifetime of loving. The collection closely examines love in all of its messy and beautiful layers. Readers will identify with the hope and disappointment that Madgett presents in these poems.

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.

Gail Griffin had only been married for four months when her husband's body was found in the Manistee River, just a few yards from their cabin door. The terrain of memoir is full of stories of grief, though Grief's Country is less concerned with the biography of a love affair than with the lived phenomenon of grief itself.

This memoir begins four years after poet Jonathan Johnson spread his mother's ashes in Lake Superior and moved with family into a seventeenth-century cottage on Scotland's North Sea. On an idyllic, desolate coast and in the wild Highlands, Johnson began his search for a way to live through ongoing grief and to take in the wonder of each new day.

A genre-bending visual memoir and work of literary nonfiction that explores the questions: What inspires a person to write a love letter? What inspires a person to save a love letter even when the love has shifted or left? And what does it mean when a person uses someone else's love letters as a place from which to create their own sense of self?

This is accessible, honest poetry about and for real people. In the collection, brian g. gilmore seeks to invite the reader into a fantastical dialogue between himself and Marvin Gaye - two black men who were born in the nation's capital, but who moved to the Midwest for professional ambitions.

A collection of autobiographical poems from the 2016-17 school year in which Jeff Kass worked as a full-time English teacher and a part-time director for a literary arts organisation and still had to supplement his income by delivering pizzas a few nights a week.

All ten stories in Unblinking take place in or circle back to Detroit and portray both the beauty and grit of the city and its inhabitants. By turns playful and grave, told with humor and candor, these down-to-earth and heavenly stories will both surprise with fresh insight and remind the reader of what they already know.

A survival guide for life - all the messy, wonderful, grieving, and self-doubting parts of life. David Hornibrook's debut poetry collection is a book of hours that keeps time through anguish and explores the ineffable borderland of existence. These are poems that seek to delineate the shape of an absence by writing the things around it.

Jack Ridl returns with a collection of poems that mix deft artistic skill with intimate meditations on everyday life, whether that be curiosity, loss, discovery, joy, or the passing of the seasons. This is the work of a talented and seasoned poet, one whose work comes out of the "plainspoken" tradition.

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.

Not long after stumbling into Mason County, Natalie Ruth Joynton finds herself the owner of four acres, a big red barn, and a white farmhouse set among the picturesque rolling hills of Northern Michigan. But there's a catch. Right in her front lawn stands a life-size tribute to the Old West-specifically, Dodge City, Kansas.

Presents new creative nonfiction by some of Michigan's most well-known and highly acclaimed authors. A celebration of the elements, this collection is both the storm and the shelter. The essays approach Michigan at the atomic level. This is a place where weather patterns and ecology matter.

The poems in Russell Thorburn's Somewhere We'll Leave the World are fluid and masterful with a flow that captures an authentic consciousness. These poems breathe and allow the reader breathing room. Powerful images and deft endings arrive like the best kind of emotional left hook - the kind that leaves you wanting more.

Idealistic characters fight to hold onto a life that is slipping out of their grasp.

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.