Milkweed Editions: 149 books

“In me, there is the red of miry clay, the brown of spring floods, the gold of ripening tobacco. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored.” From these fertile soils of love, land, identity, family, and race emerges The Home Place, a big-hearted, unforgettable memoir by ornithologist...

Rafael de Grenade was twelve years old when she quit school and soon began to work on a rough-country mountain ranch in Arizona. There she learned how to sleep out when there was no fast way home; how to track her way by familiar spires and rivers; how to survive off the water that seeped from moss hidden...

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...

Chris Dombrowski was playing a numbers game: two passions-poetry 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: can’t go, it’s all paid for, just book a flight to Miami.Thus...

Ordinary Wolves depicts a life different from what any of us has known: Inhuman cold, the taste of rancid salmon shared with shivering sled dogs, hunkering in a sod igloo while blizzards moan overhead. But this is the only world Cutuk Hawcley has ever known. Born and raised in the Arctic, he has learned...

Using such models as Joseph Cornell’s box constructions, crazy quilts, and specimen displays,Joni Tevis places fragments in relationship to each other in order to puzzle out lost histories,particularly those of women. Navigating the peril and excitement of outward journeyscomplicated by an inward longing...

The sermons of Joni Tevis’ youth filled her with dread, a sense “that an even worse story-one you hadn’t read yet-could likewise come true.” In this revelatory collection, she reckons with her childhood fears by exploring the uniquely American fascination with apocalypse. From a haunted widow’s...

Spanning one year of the author's life, I Will Not Leave You Comfortless is the intimate memoir of a young boy coming to consciousness in small-town Missouri. 1984 is the year that greets ten-year-old Jeremy with first loves, first losses, and a break from the innocence of boyhood that will never be...

A wonderful fiction debut, Being Esther gives voice to Esther Lustig, an extraordinary woman who has lived a conventional life, in this touching exploration of aging. In spare, unsentimental prose, Miriam Karmel provides readers with one of literature’s finest portraits of the last months of a woman’s...

Deciding that her life was insufficiently grounded in real-world experience, Mary Rose O'Reilley, a Quaker reared as a Catholic, embarked on a year of tending sheep. In this often hilarious book, O'Reilley describes her work in an agricultural barn and her extended visit to a Buddhist monastery in France,...

“If you want the earth as it really is,” N. Scott Momaday writes, “learn it through its sacred places.” With this quote as her guiding light, Melissa Kwasny traveled to the ancient pictograph and petroglyph sites around her rural Montana home. The poems in this collection emerge from these visits...

Using several ageless questions-“Where do we come from? Where are we going? What shall we do?”-as his point of departure, award-winning poet Christopher Merrill explores the related issues of terror, modernity, tradition, and epochal transformation. In three extended essays, Merrill observes the performance...

“From the summer of my twelfth year I carry a series of images more vivid and lasting than any others of my boyhood and indelible beyond all attempts the years make to erase or fade them… “ So begins David Hayden’s story of what happened in Montana in 1948. The events of that cataclysmic summer...

FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE IN GENERAL NONFICTION WINNER OF THE NATIONAL OUTDOOR BOOK AWARD A CHICAGO TRIBUNE TOP TEN BOOK OF 2018 A PUBLISHERS WEEKLY AND LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2018 Hailed as “deeply felt” (New York Times), “a revelation” (Pacific Standard), and “the book...