Books published by Milkweed Editions

An Indie Next Selection for September 2021From the author of the bestselling #ReadWithJenna/TODAYShow book club pickLate Migrations: A Natural History of Love and LossFor the past four years, Margaret Renkls columns have offered readers ofThe New York Timesa weekly dose of natural beauty, human decency, and persistent hope from her home in Nashville. Now more than sixty of those pieces have been brought together in this sparkling new collection.People have often asked me how it feels to be the voice of the South, writes Renkl in her introduction. But Im not the voice of the South, and no one else is, either. There are many Southsred and blue, rural and urban, mountain and coast, Black and white and brownand no one writer could possibly represent all of them. InGraceland, At Last, Renkl writes instead from her own experience about the complexities of her homeland, demonstrating along the way how much more there is to this tangled region than many people understand.In a patchwork quilt of personal and reported essays, Renkl also highlights some other voices of the South, people who are fighting for a better future for the region. A group of teenagers who organized a youth march for Black Lives Matter. An urban shepherd whose sheep remove invasive vegetation. Church parishioners sheltering the homeless. Throughout, readers will find the generosity of spirit and deep attention to the world, human and nonhuman, that keep readers returning to her columns each Monday morning.From a writer who makes one of all the worlds beings (NPR),Graceland, At Lastis a book full of gifts for Southerners and non-Southerners alike.

Selected by Sally Keith as a winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series, this debut collection is a ruminative catalogue of overgrowth and the places that haunt us.With Devon Walker-Figueroa as our Virgil, we begin in the collection's eponymous town of Philomath, Oregon. We drift through the general store, into the Nazarene Church, past people plucking at the brambles of a place that won't let them go. We move beyond the town into fields and farmland-and further still, along highways, into a cursed Californian town, a museum in Florence. We wander with a kind of animal logic, like a beast with "e;a mind to get loose / from a valley fallowing / towards foul,"e; through the tense, overlapping space between movement and stillness.An explorer at the edge of the sublime, Walker-Figueroa writes in quiet awe of nature, of memory, and of a beauty that is "e;merely existence carrying on and carrying on."e; In her wanderings, she guides readers toward a kind of witness that doesn't flinch from the bleak or bizarre: A vineyard engulfed in flames is reclaimed by the fields. A sow smothers its young, then bears more. A neighbor chews locusts in his yard.For in Philomath, it is the poet's (sometimes reluctant) obligation "e;to keep an eye / on what is left"e; of the people and places that have impacted us. And there is always something left, whether it is the smell of burnt grapes, a twelfth-century bronze, or even a lock of hair.

"e;Sometimes,"e; writes Michael Kleber-Diggs writes in this winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, "e;everything reduces to circles and lines."e;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 "e;offer allegiance"e; 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. "e;Let's create folklore side-by-side,"e; he urges, asking us to aspire to a form of nurturing defined by tenderness, to a kind of community devoted to mutual prosperity. "e;All of us want,"e; after all, "e;our share of light, and just enough rainfall."e;Sonorous and measured, the poems of Worldly Things offer needed guidance on ways forward-toward radical kindness and a socially responsible poetics.

A haunting novel spanning several generations, The Seed Keeper follows a Dakhota family's struggle to preserve their way of life, and their sacrifices to protect what matters most.Rosalie Iron Wing has grown up in the woods with her father, Ray, a former science teacher who tells her stories of plants, of the stars, of the origins of the Dakhta people. Until, one morning, Ray doesn't return from checking his traps. Told she has no family, Rosalie is sent to live with a foster family in nearby Mankato-where the reserved, bookish teenager meets rebellious Gaby Makespeace, in a friendship that transcends the damaged legacies they've inherited. On a winter's day many years later, Rosalie returns to her childhood home. A widow and mother, she has spent the previous two decades on her white husband's farm, finding solace in her garden even as the farm is threatened first by drought and then by a predatory chemical company. Now, grieving, Rosalie begins to confront the past, on a search for family, identity, and a community where she can finally belong. In the process, she learns what it means to be descended from women with souls of iron-women who have protected their families, their traditions, and a precious cache of seeds through generations of hardship and loss, through war and the insidious trauma of boarding schools. Weaving together the voices of four indelible women, The Seed Keeper is a beautifully told story of reawakening, of remembering our original relationship to the seeds and, through them, to our ancestors.

"Some of my favorite people on Earth are in this book, dear writers and grand spirits." -ANNIE DILLARD

"Both carefully observed and daringly philosophical . . . The cosmos aches, as it did for Orpheus and for Gilgamesh, and as it did for Eve." -MARK DOTY

"Eric Pankey writes poems that give us back, if not the world, our relation to it." -DAN BEACHY-QUICK

"[Yuri Rytkheu's] deep emotional attachment to this landscape of ice (today melting away under global warming forces) makes every sentence seem a poetic revelation." -ANNIE PROULX

"A stunning overlap of a lost boy and lost landscape through the lens of a gifted poet's magical linguistic and storytelling abilities." -VICTORIA CHANG

"One of our brightest talents."-ISHMAEL REED

"Beautifully written, masterfully structured, and brimming with insight into the natural world . . . It has the makings of an American classic." -ANN PATCHETT

"A lush gem of a book, both heartbreaking and heart-making."-AMY THIELEN

"Poetic exploration in Middle English about the body, physical space, ownership of space, gender, and transitioning genders."--

"Correspondence between playwright-teacher Sarah Ruhl and poet-cancer patient Max Ritvo, in which the student becomes the teacher" --

From National Geographic's 2014 Adventurers of the Year, a beautifully illustrated account of a year in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness

From "one of the preeminent American visionaries of our moment" (G. C. Waldrep), a singular reflection on living well in a time of distraction and despair

The speaker in this extraordinary collection finds herself multiply dislocated: from her childhood in California, from her familys roots in Mexico, from a dying parent, from her prior self. The world is always in motion both toward and away from usand it is also full of risk: from sharks unexpectedly lurking beneath estuarial rivers to the dangers of New York City, where, as Limn reminds us, even rats find themselves trapped by the garbage cans theyve crawled into. In such a world, how should one proceed? Throughout Sharks in the Rivers, Limn suggests that we must cleave to the world as it keeps opening before us, for, if we pay attention, we can be one with its complex, ephemeral, and beautiful strangeness. Loss is perpetual, and each persons mouth is the same / mouth as everyones, all trying to say the same thing. For Limn, its the sayingindividual and collective that transforms each of us into a wound overcome by wonder, that allows the wind itself to be our own wild whisper.