Bøger udgivet af Milkweed Editions

¿I give daily thanks for Robin Wall Kimmerer for being a font of endless knowledge, both mental and spiritual.¿ ¿RICHARD POWERS, NEW YORK TIMES

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

Chris Dombrowski was playing a numbers game: two passionspoetry 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: cant go, its 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 Pinders stories unfold, Dombrowski discovers a profound integrity and wisdom in the guides life.

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.

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on "e;a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise"e; (Elizabeth Gilbert). Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings-asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass-offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

A ground-breaking collection of poems exploring disability, syntax, and rhythm from a Brooklyn-based Senegalese American writer with cerebral palsy. In this fifth offering from the Multiverse series, Latif Askia Ba--a poet with Choreic Cerebral Palsy--honors all the things that arise from our unique choreographies. Meeting each reader with corporeal generosity, these poems create space to practice a radical reclamation of movement and the body. Together. In dialogue. In disability. At the bodega, in the examination room, on the move. "This way. My body looks like a dancing tattoo." Here, the drum of the body punctuates thought in unexpected and invigorating time signatures.These poems are percussive and syncopated, utilizing a polylingual braid of French, Spanish, Jamaican, Fulani, and Wolof that reminds the Anglophone reader: "I am not here to accommodate you." Because these poems are not so much for you as they are with you, an accompaniment rather than an accommodation, something to be rather than something to own.With startling nuance, The Choreic Period encourages us to "relinquish the things that we have. And mark the thing that we do," all to see and sing the vital "thing that we be."

An attentive collection of poems seeking answers about how to live meaningfully in a world saturated by white noise."The question isn't / what exists," writes Sarah V. Schweig in this engrossing collection of poems, "The question is what doesn't / die with us?" Positioned from within the morass of modern-day living, The Ocean in the Next Room searches for the hard, abiding particles of truth buried beneath the mantle of late capitalism. Stillness. Sunsets. The circadian rhythm of trees. These poems guide us to look past content, brands, and relentless jargon to find meaning in those layers of the world that operate without human intervention or interpretation.And yet: "Why this impulse to poetry if I believe the literal all that's left?" In verse that is at once inventive and innately familiar, Schweig unpacks the urge to make art, life, and connections even at the risk of becoming further entangled in the Anthropocene. In the face of the twenty-first century's fearful enormities and its persistent mundanities, she posits, we need reminders that beauty, friendship, and kindness, are all still possible. "We light lights / in the dark. It's a human thing."Profound and clear-sighted, this collection--selected by Cynthia Cruz for the 2023-24 Jake Adam York Prize--urges us to lift our gazes from our screens and really look at the world around us. If we measure our attentions and sharpen our intentions, if we "try again to write / the truth things," we might spy something real on the horizon.

From the award-winning author of Cures for Hunger and Into the Sun, a haunting novel exploring artificial intelligence and the meaning of human existence.Charged initially with a single task--"to never harm humans and to protect them"--an experimental AI project overrides its programming and determines that the best way to accomplish its purpose is to isolate all of the Earth's remaining seven billion human beings in controlled environments. And to present them with vivid, tactile, imagined worlds--some realistic, others entirely fantastical--in which all desires are fulfilled. With the help of the Machine, a memorable cast of characters unpack deeply traumatic memories of the past--one rife with violence after a military coup and second civil war in America. Michael, the entrepreneur who designed the original AI, grapples with the impact of his research. Ava, a painter and Michael's long-ago lover, creates stunning simulated worlds that meld the human with the technological. Their daughter Jae tries to solve the mysteries of her parentage while reliving the harsh reality of life for young women with big ambitions. Haunted by life in the repressive Confederacy, where he was forced to scavenge scrap metal and deal drugs to survive, Simon remembers past loves and losses, guided by the literature he has always turned to in moments of crisis. Raised by the Machine since infancy, Jonah pieces together information about the violence of the past, intent on revenge against the powerful world leaders who caused his family so much pain. And the elusive Lux, whose brilliant programming helped bring the AI to life, dreams of a future in which science will free humans of their limitations and allow them to be reborn as divine machines. As these characters and their memories collide and coalesce, this daring speculative novel tackles the most pressing issues of our time. The power and potential of AI and virtual reality. Repressive social orders that drive people to violence. Genetic modification and designer babies. Gender roles and class divisions. Addiction and drug crisis. The value of free information and speech. The existence of souls. What it means to be happy. What it means, ultimately, to be human. Gorgeously written, bold and unforgettable, this is speculative fiction at its finest.

Here is Connemara, experienced at a walker's pace. From cartographer Robinson comes the second title in the Seedbank series, a breathtakingly intimate exploration of one beloved place's geography, ecology, and history. "Exceptional...A book about one place which is also about the whole world."--Robert MacFarlane.lane.

In "the story collection of the year" (Paper magazine), Ken Kalfus mines a vast terrain of geography and metaphor to create a stunning series of portraits of people caught in the seismic collision of cultures, be they real, hallucinated, dreamed, or desired. With his "magical, transformative, and captivating" (Boston Book Review) mix of fantasy and dark humor, Kalfus has crafted an extraordinary collection that is, by turns, hilarious, mysterious, and touching.

Selected by Jos Charles as the winner of the 2021 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, Return Flight is a lush reckoning: with inheritance, with body, with trauma, with desire—and with the many tendons in between. When Return Flight asks “what name / do you crown yourself,” Jennifer Huang answers with many. Textured with mountains—a folkloric goddess-prison, Yushan, mother, men, self—and peppered with shapeshifting creatures, spirits, and gods, the landscape of Huang’s poems is at once mystical and fleshy, a “myth a mess of myself.” Sensuously, Huang depicts each of these not as things to claim but as topographies to behold and hold. Here, too, is another kind of mythology. Set to the music of “beating hearts / through objects passed down,” the poems travel through generations—among Taiwan, China, and America—cataloging familial wounds and beloved stories. A grandfather’s smile shining through rain, baby bok choy in a child’s bowl, a slap felt decades later—the result is a map of a present-day life, reflected through the past.Return Flight is a thrumming debut that teaches us how history harrows and heals, often with the same hand; how touch can mean “purple” and “blue” as much as it means intimacy; and how one might find a path toward joy not by leaving the past in the past, but by “[keeping a] hand on these memories, / to feel them to their ends.”

From the celebrated author of Last Notes, a brilliant collection of stories exploring a world in which ordinary people are caught between the pincers of aggressors, leading to actions at once deplorable, perplexing, and heroic Praise for Siege 13 "Tamas Dobozy's stories are usually about Hungarians living outside of Hungary, lost forever in the labyrinth built on the thin border between memories and reality, past and present, words and silence. Like Nabokov, Dobozy combines the best elements of European and American storytelling, creating a fictional world of his own." --David Albahari Praise for Last Notes "Strange and intense." --The New York Times "An artistic and intellectual boon." --Publishers Weekly "Strikes the right balance between the surreal and the realistic. These stories have a staying power, a bleak charm that remains long after you put down the book." --Bookslut

Kalfus plucks individual lives from the stew of a century of Russian history and serves them up in tales that range from hair-raising to comic to fabulous. The astonishing title story follows a doomed nuclear power plant worker as he hawks a most unusual package on the black market -- a canister of weapons-grade plutonium. In "Orbit," the first cosmonaut navigates several items not on the preflight checklist as he prepares to blaze the trail for the new communist society, "floating free of terrestrial compromise." In "Budyonnovsk," a young man hopes desperately that the takeover of his town by Chechen rebels will somehow save his marriage. Set in the 1920s, "Birobidzhan" is the bittersweet story of a Jewish couple journeying to the Soviet Far East, where they intend to establish the modern world's first Jewish state. The novella, "Peredelkino," which closes the book, traces the fortunes of a 1960s literary apparatchik whose romantic intrigues inadvertently become political. Together, these works of fiction capture the famously enigmatic Russian psyche. They display Kalfus' ability to imagine a variety of believable yet wholly singular characters whose lives percolate against a backdrop of momentous events.

"Translated from the Arabic and introduced by Fady Joudah, You Can Be the Last Leaf draws on two decades of work to present the transcendent and timely US debut of Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat"--

"First published by Doubleday Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Ltd."--Title page verso.

Rhodes's long-awaited new novel turns an unblinking eye on an array of eccentric characters and situations. The setting is Words, Wisconsin, an anonymous town of only a few hundred people, but under its sleepy surface, life rages.

An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from U.S. Poet Laureate and MacArthur Fellow Ada Limón.“I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers,” writes Limón. “I am the hurting kind.” What does it mean to be the hurting kind? To be sensitive not only to the world’s pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world? To divine the relationships between us all? To perceive ourselves in other beings—and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they “do not / care to be seen as symbols”?With Limón’s remarkable ability to trace thought, The Hurting Kind explores those questions—incorporating others’ stories and ways of knowing, making surprising turns, and always reaching a place of startling insight. These poems slip through the seasons, teeming with horses and kingfishers and the gleaming eyes of fish. And they honor parents, stepparents, and grandparents: the sacrifices made, the separate lives lived, the tendernesses extended to a hurting child; the abundance, in retrospect, of having two families.Along the way, we glimpse loss. There are flashes of the pandemic, ghosts whose presence manifests in unexpected memories and the mysterious behavior of pets left behind. But The Hurting Kind is filled, above all, with connection and the delight of being in the world. “Slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still / green in the morning’s shade,” writes Limón of a groundhog in her garden, “she is doing what she can to survive.”

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, demanding that we resuscitate language “before [our] wisdom is an echo.” These poems of urgency and care sing powerfully through a combination of intimate clarity and great dilations of scale, sending the reader on heartrending spins through echelons of time. […] is a wonder. Joudah reminds us “Wonder belongs to all.”

"An abundant and anticipatory collection of poems exploring the season of waiting that precedes adoption"--

“Offering a deeply necessary, clear-eyed look at who we are as flesh-and-bone bodies during the climate crisis, this is a book that searches and finds meaning in both the hard truths and the value of wonder.”—Ada LimónIn this luminous collection of essays, Ellen Wayland-Smith probes the raw edges of human existence, those periods of life in which our bodies remind us of our transience and the boundaries of the self dissolve. For it is in such liminal states—losing a parent, giving birth, experiencing a nervous breakdown, coping with breast cancer—that we, too, are part of “the cosmic molecular arc that binds all life.”From the Old Testament to Maggie Nelson, these explorations are grounded in a rich network of associations. In an essay on the postpartum body, Wayland-Smith interweaves her experience as a mother with accounts of phantom limbs and Greek mythology to meditate on moments when pieces of our being exist outside our bodies. In order to comprehend diagnoses of depression and breast cancer, she delves into LA hippie culture’s love affair with crystals and Emily Dickinson’s geological poetry. Her experience with chemotherapy leads to reflection on Western medicine and its intolerance of death and the healing capacity of nature. And throughout, she challenges the false separation between the human and the “primeval, animal mode of being.”At once intimate and expansive, The Science of Last Things peels back layers of human thought and behavior, breaking down our modern conceptions of individuality and reframing us as participants in a world of astounding elegance and mystery.

"An excavatory collection of poems tracing the connections between Jewish transfemininity, queer desire, and cultural histories"--

"A spry collection of poems reflecting on art, the aging body, and the experiences of a lifetime"--

"An intimate and kaleidoscopic entry in the Multiverse series exploring compulsion, connection, and poetic curiosity"--

"A vulnerable and honest collection of poems exploring lineage, love, and the pandemic, from one of the most acclaimed poets of his generation"--

“Nothing less than the history of a people in the form of an absorbing and emotionally searing memoir.”—David Treuer, author of The Heartbeat of Wounded KneeGrowing up in Montana, Chris La Tray always identified as Indian. While the representation of Indigenous people was mostly limited to racist depictions in toys and television shows, and despite the fact that his father fiercely denied any connection, he found Indians alluring, often recalling his grandmother’s consistent mention of their Chippewa heritage.When La Tray attended his grandfather’s funeral as a young man, he finally found himself surrounded by relatives who obviously were Indigenous. “Who were they?” he wondered, and “Why was I never allowed to know them?” Embarking on a deeply personal and revealing journey into his family’s past, he discovers a larger story of the complicated history of Indigenous communities—and the devastating effects of colonialism that continue to ripple through surviving generations. Combining diligent research and compelling conversations with Indigenous authors, activists, elders, and historians, La Tray follows a trail deep into the heart of his community—and himself. And as he comes to embrace his full identity, he eventually seeks enrollment with the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians, joining their 158-year-long struggle for federal recognition.Both personal and historical, Becoming Little Shell is a testament to the power of storytelling, to family and legacy, and to finding home. Infused with candor, heart, wisdom, and an abiding love for a place and a people, Chris La Tray’s remarkable journey—and the journey of his tribe—is both revelatory and redemptive.

"In 2010, experienced wilderness travelers Amy and Dave Freeman married and set out on an unusual honeymoon: a 12,000 mile, human-powered journey across North America"--