Bøger udgivet af Milkweed Editions

Drawing inspiration from the work of Rene Char, Melissa Kwasny in The Nine Senses presents a new kind of prose poem. Casting aside the narrative-plus-moral formula of old, these experiments make each line equal to the next, challenging the way we read sequentially. Dylan Thomas, Roman water lines, Paul Celan, Shirin Neshat, anti-depressants, Buddhism, William Carlos Williams, Trakl, cancer, Beckett, Pound, Breton, the Iraq War, telekinesis, clairvoyance, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and Yeats, among many others, appear side by side in these pages.As if liberating the intellect, the prose poem form invites a wave of vivid, colliding images, and allows a comfortable wordiness and word play that is inherently poetic. Raising the ante even further than Reading Novalis in Montana, this book asks how do we tie ourselves to the world when our minds are always someplace other than where we are?As bromides and aphorisms degrade in this new construct, we are left with the realization that we have been misled by culture and politics, which encourages prevarication. Obliquely touching on the cancer of a friend, her own troubled relationship with her father, and the break-up of a nearly thirty-year partnership, Kwasny also questions mortality, temporality, and eternity. Walking the knife-edge between safety and danger, and marveling over the quickness with which the familiar can end, Kwasny posits a new perception of time, in which the work lives on under new direction. Near the end of the book, Kwasnys signature abstraction melts away in some very direct poems about her own cancer and diagnosis.With this manuscript, Kwasny achieves a new level of artistry. Although form is consistent throughout, the thematic cycle is rich and varied: abstract, elliptic, collaged, and ultimately evolving toward the end into powerful statements that are some of the most direct ever uttered by this author.

Christopher Howells haunted and haunting collection, Gaze, is a book of counterpoints, swinging between moments of delicate connection (touching a girls wrist) and striking brutality (a boy slamming a just-caught fish against a boats stern to kill it as he was taught). Howell explores how our interior and exterior lives are entangledthe past living on inside us as we live inside the physical world that surrounds usand he reminds us particularly of how loss releases us into the present, how in the process of living, everybody pays. Gaze is divided into three sections, focusing successively on the objective world, the world of inner life, and finally on the "e;other world"e; of the imagination and alternate reality. The author speaks through his own voice as well as the voices of other characters, ghosts, and creatures. Shifting between lyric and narrative poetry, the many voices come together to question and explore our perception of the world. While many similarly ambitious books unwisely set out to stake a claim on wisdom, however, these poems proceed incrementally and with humilityand thus, through their quiet and careful examinations, offer a far greater kind of wisdom.

The narrators in this mesmerizing collection often desire to hold time still in moments of love, yes, but also when feeling fully located in a particular place or experience. Yet they also acknowledge that to hold time still would mean the death of love, the death of experience. Thus, the grounding and locating sensory images that surround us and the eye that apprehends them become greatly important. At the heart of the book is What Night Says to the Empty Boat, a sequence of lyric poems in which the three main characters Justine, Clarence, and Andy drift to and from, together and apart, viewed through the dispassionate lens of the unspoken fourth main character. An artistic and philosophical endeavor to place oneself in the world, this stunning collection is a wholehearted embrace of being, where technique and subject come together in a remarkable combination of personal lyric and formal innovation.

Seamlessly bridging the material and spiritual worlds, Seedlip and Sweet Apple takes the reader into the mind of a true visionary: Mother Ann Lee, the founder of the Shaker religion in colonial America. With astonishingly original poems inspired by extensive historical research, Arra Lynn Ross creates a collection linked thematically through the voice and story of the woman who was believed by her followers to be Christ incarnate. Broadly and inclusively spiritual, this remarkable debut captures the ineffable experience of ecstatic vision, activating the progression from literal reality to heightened perception. Simultaneously, this journey delves into the manifold issues of gender and religion, public image, and charismatic leadership, as well as the line between cult and commune and the tenuous bond between faith and behavior. Written in an impressive cornucopia of forms including iambic quatrains, free verse, and prose poems Seedlip and Sweet Apple honors a complex figure startlingly relevant to contemporary life, pointing to a revolutionary way to work at living and to live in working that promises simplicity, peace, and joy.

"Romantic-environmental poetry of a high order." —HUFFINGTON POSTThis tour de force marks a breakthrough in Melissa Kwasny’s poetic investigation of a collective consciousness.Drawing inspiration from Novalis (1772–1801), a poet who, like the other adherents of early German Romanticism, believed in the correspondence between inner and outer worlds, Kwasny divines the palpable and ineffable ways in which inherited traditions—indigenous culture, mythology, romanticism, modernism, surrealism, postmodernism, and more—inform daily life.Finding inspiration in the mountain West, Kwasny weaves a shimmering web of connections. Throughout, details of lived experience emerge—hiking through the Pacific Northwest, caring for an elder’s great-granddaughter, helping a friend deal with cancer, sorting through the ruins of a relationship—and yet the interior voice is always tuned to the physical world, envisioning the shared understanding that connects all life.Versatile in its forms and expressions, encyclopedic in its comprehension, Reading Novalis in Montana is a virtuoso performance.

In these edgy, elegant poems, Éireann Lorsung seeks balance in her world between the need for permanence and the heady seductiveness of the moment. Her intuitive knowledge of poetic form (line breaks, enjambment, repetition, punctuation) and her strong poetic voice channel some of the genre’s greats while remaining distinctive. From the prayer-like musicality of “All Through the Night,” to the visually dynamic “Oceanside,” to the theatrical “Bird Woman, Duck Hunting,” these poems exhibit a visceral creativity that establishes the author as a major new voice in the field.

John Caddy’s latest collection of poems documents his recovery from a stroke. Carefully negotiating the balance of outside and inside, the poems rebuild a delicate web of cognition, identity, and perception. From the revulsion on a child’s face as Caddy struggles to walk to the gift of a night nurse revealing a tattoo, the poems defy consolation in their consideration of mortality. Also containing poems from three previous collections, With Mouths Open Wide showcases the best work of a major contemporary poet.

Coding and decoding are the themes of Anne-Marie Oomen''s collection of poems, which together tell the story of a woman named Bead and her search for a safe harbor. The maritime International Code of Signals becomes a symbolic guide to Bead''s journey, lending weightier meaning to boating phrases such as "You should proceed with caution" and "I am continuing to search." The beautiful terrain near Lake Michigan forms a powerful backdrop to the exploration of the life of a woman and her Native American lover, whose poverty and desperation are in stark contrast to the wealthy resort community around them. As an essayist and playwright, Oomen is known for her ability to convey the inner landscape of a woman''s mind; this is her first book of poetry.

In Blue Lash, James Armstrong explores the way a physical place can be alchemically transformed into mental geographies. The world of Lake Superior comes alive and expands outward in these poems: cicadas "grind their teeth/under the blue roof of August"; a quartz pebble becomes "little knuckle/petrified egg/white as a wave-cap"; a Jet Ski "revs past the dock/like a demon out of Milton." Stripping away the layer of sentimentality that often cloaks the lake, Armstrong portrays it instead as a rebuke to human arrogance, and a reminder of the sublime indifference of wild places.

One of America's major contemporary poets, Pattiann Rogers is known for her penetrating perception, striking imagery, and intricate sense of the often elusive connections between humankind and their world. For "Firekeeper," Rogers has assembled her best work, deleting some poems from the original edition and adding others. Here are such resonant older poems as "Suppose Your Father Was a Redbird" and "Rolling Naked in the Morning Dew," along with such masterful new poems as "The Dream of the Marsh Wren: Reciprocal Creation," "Born of a Rib," and "Generations."

In Playing the Black Piano, poet Bill Holm confronts themes of aging, AIDS, friendship, and music, revealing an everyman sensibility that celebrates the beauty, truth, and evanescence of everyday life. Typical is "Playing Haydn for the Angel of Death," in which the reaper sits in a straight-backed chair in the side yard, in no hurry to claim his due as long as strains of Haydn drift through the window to amuse and distract him.

Inspired by a rough-and-tumble journey across country and down river, David Gessner makes the case for a new environmentalism. In a frank, funny, and incisive call to arms that spans from the Cape Wind Project to the Monkey Wrench Gang, he considers why we do or do not fight to protect and restore wilderness, and reminds us why its time to join the fray.Though environmental awareness is on the rise, our march toward ecological collapse continues. What was once a movement based primarily on land preservation, endangered species, and policy reform is now a fractured mess of back-to-the-landers, capitalist green lifestyle vendors, technology worshipers, and countless special interest groups.Known as an environmental advocate reminiscent of Edward Abbey (Library Journal), Gessner rebels against this fragmented environmentalism and holier-than-thou posturing. He also suggests that global problems, though real, are disempowering. While introducing us to lovable, stubborn Dan Driscoll, a regular guy fighting a local fight for a limited wilderness, he argues instead for a movement focused on local issues and grounded in a more basic, more holisticand ultimately more effectivedefense of home.

Stately oaks, ivy-covered walls, the opposite sex these are the things that likely come to mind for most Americans when they think about the "e;nature"e; of college. But the real nature of college is hidden in plain sight: its flowing out of the keg, its woven into the mascots on our T-shirts. Engaging in a deep and richly entertaining study of "e;campus ecology,"e; The Nature of College explores one day in the life of the average student, questioning what "e;natural"e; is and what "e;common sense"e; is really good for and weighing the collective impacts of the everyday. In the end, this fascinating, highly original book rediscovers and repurposes the great and timeless opportunity presented by college: to study the American way of life, and to develop a more sustainable, better way to live.

Reflecting on the past and a hard-won sense of self, Mary O’Reilley is determined not to sacrifice or waste herself. At midlife, she writes, she is finally learning to withhold after years of struggle on paths set by her suburban childhood, her Catholic upbringing, and a failed marriage. With a new perspective, O''Reilley discovers the pleasure in overlapping worlds and the intersections where rules break down, and she cultivates this border ecology. An animal rehabilitator, she feels the nearness yet difference of the universe the animals know. An apprentice potter, she sees in a Japanese teabowl the ultimate balance of action and contemplation. A woman who lives alone but has a life partner, she knows the joys of both solitude and companionship. And as a Quaker, she can both sit still and sing. This thoughtful book brings readers into a “demo” life that conveys new ways of seeing and a fresh vocabulary for exploring issues of the spirit.

Bill Holm is one of a kind. A Minnesotan of Icelandic ancestry, his travels have taken him all over the world, providing the material for a number of rich and memorable books. In The Windows of Brimnes, Holm travels to Brimnes, his fishermans cottage on the shore of a creek in northern Iceland. From there, he considers the fate of America "e;my home, my citizenship, my burden"e; in these provocative essays.

Can the love reserved for family and friends be extended to a place? In her latest book, acclaimed author Kathleen Dean Moore reflects on how deeply the environment is entrenched in the human spirit, despite the notion that nature and humans are somehow separate. Moore's essays, deeply felt and often funny, make connections in what can appear to be a disconnected world. Written in parable form, her stories of family and friends of wilderness excursions with her husband and children, camping trips with students, blowing up a dam, her daughter's arrest for protesting the war in Iraq affirm an impulse of caring that belies the abstract division of humans from nature, of the sacred from the mundane. Underlying these wonderfully engaging stories is the authors belief in a new ecological ethic of care, one that expands the idea of community to include the environment, and embraces the land as family.

Are the urbanites trekking trails with cell phones, synthetic fabrics, and GPS units having remotely the same experience that Thoreau did in 1846? Pinder's interviews with these hikers create a vivid portrait of the communion with nature they seek, and of the world they are trying to escape.

MILKWEED NATIONAL FICTION PRIZE WINNERINDIE HEARTLAND BESTSELLERONE BOOK SOUTH DAKOTA SELECTIONMINNESOTA BOOK AWARD FINALISTMIDWEST BOOKSELLERS BOOK AWARD FINALISTGrey Rabbit, an Ojibwe woman living by Lake Superior in 1622, is a mother and wife whose dream-life has taken on fearful dimensions. As she struggles to understand what she is shown at night, her psyche and her world edge toward irreversible change. In 1902, Berit and Gunnar, a Norwegian fishing couple, also live on the lake. Berit is unable to conceive, and the lake anchors her isolated life and tests the limits of her endurance and spirit. And in 2000, when Nora, a seasoned bar owner, loses her job and is faced with an open-ended future, she is drawn reluctantly into a road trip around the great lake.The Long-Shining Waters is the story of these three women, separated by years and circumstance but connected across time by a shared geography: the inland sea. Rich with historical detail, each character comes vividly to life in this luminous debut novel.Danielle Sosin has written the first great novel about Lake Superiorand its many ghosts.Minnesota Monthly

Larry Watson's bestselling novel Montana 1948 was acclaimed as a "e;work of art"e; (Susan Petro, San Francisco Chronicle), a prize-winning evocation of a time, a place, and a family. Justice is the stunning prequel that illuminates the Hayden clan's early years, and the circumstances that led to the events of Montana 1948. With the precision of a master storyteller, Watson moves seamlessly among the strong and hard-bitten characters that make up the Hayden family, and in the process opens an evocative window on the very heart of the American West.