Books published by Milkweed Editions

"A groundbreaking work about race and the American landscape. Thoughtful, sincere, wise, and beautiful."-Helen Macdonald

John James Audubon is renowned for his masterpiece of natural history and art, The Birds of America, the first nearly comprehensive survey of the continents 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.

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 thesea 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 wont 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 preciousAnd Bad Hobby thinkshard. 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. Dont worry, baby, Fagan tells us, the sparrow at her window. Were okay.

Somewhere between elegy and memoir, poetry and prose, Ed Pavlis Call It in the Air follows the death of a sister into song.Pavlis 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. Kates 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, Pavli 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 Pavlis 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, Pavli 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.

"Béchard's poetic gifts give voice to the outsiders of society, and make them glow with humanity and love." -ELIZABETH MCKENZIE

Marena struggles to remember what life was like before the Zero Tolerance Party installed listening devices in every home. Before they murdered her mother and put her father under house arrest. A time when difference was celebrated.When the new Minister of Education cracks down in her school, eliminating personal expression and independent thought, Marena decides she has to fight back. Fueled by her memories and animated by her mother’s spirit, Marena forms a resistance group–the White Rose. With little more than words, Marena defies the state officers lurking around every corner, and embarks on a campaign of life-affirming civil disobedience.The Silenced draws on the true story of Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, a movement that courageously resisted the Nazis. In an era when new technologies are accompanied by increasing surveillance, this is a powerfully relevant story of the enormous change that is possible when one person is courageous enough to speak the truth to power.

A thoughtful new collection of poems, one that deconstructs the deceptively simple question of what it means to be gooda 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 lifes countless unglamorous dilemmas: crushing a spider when we promised we wouldnt, nearing madness from a newborns 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 Chararas good company even as goodness challenges us to do more.

In The Wanting Way, the second book in Multiverse-a literary series written and curated by the neurodivergent-Adam Wolfond proves more than willing to "extend the choreography."In fact, his entire thrust is out and toward. Each poem moves out along its own underutilized pathway, awakening unseen dimensions for the reader like a wooded night walk suddenly lit by fireflies. And as each path elaborates itself, Wolfond's guiding hand seems always to stay held out to the reader, inviting them further into a shared and unprecedented unfolding. The Wanting Way is actually a confluence of diverse ways-rallies, paths, waves, jams, streams, desire lines-that converge wherever the dry verbiage of the talking world requires hydration. Each poem is an invitation to bathe in the play of languaging. And each poem is an invitation to a dance that's already happening, called into motion by the objects and atmospheres of a more-than-human world. Wolfond makes space for new poetics, new choreographies, and new possibilities toward forging a consensual-felt and feeling-world where we might find free disassembly and assembly together. There is a neurodivergent universe within this one, and Wolfond's poems continuously pull back the unnecessary veil between human and nature.

Author is a writer and book critic who has been widely published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Huffington PostAuthor is a filmmaker who wrote, directed and produced the feature documentary The Song of the Little Road, starring Martin Scorsese and Ravi Shankar, which premiered at Sundance Film FestivalThe book's celebration of the wonders of the natural world, birds, and birding around the world, and its exploration of the immigrant experience will appeal to readers of Aimee Nezhukumatathil's World of Wonders, which has sold over 350K copies, as well as to readers of J. Drew Lanham's memoir The Home PlaceAccording to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Services, more than 45 million people watch birds around their homes and away from their homes

It is 2027. August Helm is thirty years old. A biochemist working in a lab at the University of Chicago, he is swept off his feet by the beautiful and entirely self-assured Amanda Clark. Animated by August's consuming desire, their relationship quickly becomes intimate. But when he stumbles across a liaison between the director of his lab and a much younger student, his position is eliminated and his world upended. August sets out to visit his parents in Words, an unincorporated village in the heart of Wisconsin's Driftless Area. Here, he reconnects with several characters from his past: Ivan Bookchester, who now advocates for "new ways of living" in an age of decline; Hanh, formerly known as Jewelweed, who tends her orchard and wild ginseng, keenly attuned to new patterns of migration resulting from climate change and habitat destruction; and Lester Mortal, the aging veteran and fierce pacifist who long ago rescued her from Vietnam. Together, the old friends fall back into a familiar closeness. But much as things initially seem unchanged in the Driftless, when August is hired to look after Tom and April Lux's home in Forest Gate, he finds himself in the midst of an entirely different social set, made up of wealthy homeowners who are mostly resented by the poorer surrounding communities, and distanced in turn by their fear of the locals. August soon falls head over heels for April, and different versions of his self collide: one in which the past is still present in tensions and dreams, another in which he understands his desire as genetically determined and chemically induced, and then a vaguely hoped-for future with April. When Lester is diagnosed with liver cirrhosis, Ivan comes clean on a ghastly past episode, and April makes a shocking revelation, a series of events ensues that will change all involved forever.   As approachable as it is profound in exploring the human condition and our shared need for community, this is a story for our times.

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,â€? Sinkhole richly layers personal, familial, political, and environmental histories to provide not answers but essential, heartbreaking truth.

Winner of the Max Ritvo PoetryPrize, Ryann Stevensons Human Resources is a sobering andperceptive portrait of technologys impact on connection and power.Human Resources followsa woman working in the male-dominated world of AI, designing women that dontexist. In discerning verse, she workshops thefacial characteristics of a floating head named Nia, who her boss calls histype; she loses hours researching June, an oddly sexualized artificiallyintelligent oven; and she spends a whole day trying to break a femaleself-improvement bot. Thespeaker of Stevensons poems grapples with uneasiness and isolation, even asshe endeavors to solve for these problems in her daily work. She attempts toharness control by eating clean, doing yoga, and searching for age-defying skincare, though she dreams about the department / that women get reassigned toafter they file / harassment complaints. With sharp, lyrical intelligence, sheimagines alternative realities where women exist not for the whims of men butfor their ownwhere they become literal skyscrapers, towering over a world thatnever appreciated them.Chilling and lucid, HumanResources challenges the minds programming our present and future to considerwhat serves the collective good. Something perhaps more thoughtful and human,Stevenson writes: I want to say better.

Author is a highly acclaimed poet whose last collection of poems The Carrying won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and was named an ALA Notable Book of 2018Author was appointed the new host of the daily poetry podcast The Slowdown, taking over from former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K SmithAuthor's previous collection Bright Dead Things was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts AwardAuthor's last collection The Carrying was widely reviewed by the New York Times, the Washington Post, O, the Oprah Magazine, the Guardian, and NPR, among other prominent publications, and was praised by bestselling authors Tracy K Smith and Roxane GayAuthor's last collection The Carrying has sold almost 20K copies in hardcover and paperbackWe expect major blurbs and major press, with a two-page profile already seeded in Publishers Weekly and early coverage in the New Yorker, CNN, Lit Hub, and Books Are MagicThe book's engagement with pain, family, the natural world, generational trauma, grief, and hope will invite a wide readership and provide opportunities for rich coverageAuthor worked as a bookseller at Readers' Books in Sonoma, CA, and is deeply engaged in the independent bookselling communityPreorder coop available to indie accounts (order 5+, get $25)

"Reading Ali is an act of redemption . . . both a challenge and a balm." -THE RUMPUS