Milkweed Editions: 149 books

Incantatory, intimate, and incendiary, the poems of this award-winning debut are filled with explosive wit and humor like “a knife you don’t see coming.” A kaleidoscopic intelligence flows through Beautiful Zero, embracing forms of culture high and low in effort to finding meaning in the chaos....

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,...

Inaugural winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, selected by Ross Gay and presented in partnership with Copper Nickel The author’s star is quickly rising, this is her debut collection, but she has already published in the New Yorker, Boston Review, and was selected by Tracy K. Smith for inclusion...

In her accomplished second collection of poems, Katrina Vandenberg writes from the intersection of power and forgiveness. With poems named for letters of the Phoenician alphabet, and employing such innovative forms as the ancient ghazal, Vandenberg deciphers the seemingly indecipherable in this extraordinary...

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...

Humans were surrounded by other animals from the beginning of time: they were food, clothes, adversaries, companions, jokes, and gods. And yet, our companions in evolution are leaving the world - both as physical beings and spiritual symbols - and not returning. In this collection of linked essays, Alison...

From celebrated poet Eric Pankey, a collection exploring the presence of the divine in the seemingly ordinary. The ancient Romans practiced augury, reading omens in bird's flight patterns. In the poems of Augury, revelation is found in nature's smallest details: a lizard's quick movements,...

"THE EARTH BROKE OPEN CAUSE WE BROKE IT OPEN," blares the first line of this enrapturing debut collection mapping the myth of Narcissus and Echo and the Iron Range roots of Bob Dylan onto a world growing increasingly self-obsessed. Against the backdrop of the mining town of Hibbing, Minnesota, Brian...

In this compact collection, “settling the score” provides a fascinating apparatus for exploring foundational civilizing ideas. Notions of courage, cowardice, and revenge course through Michael Garriga’s flash fiction pieces, each one of which captures a duel’s decisive moment from three distinct...

Based on sources as diverse as Heian period female Japanese writers and the world of science fiction, and drawing on her own experience as a second-generation Japanese American, acclaimed poet Lee Ann Roripaugh’s fourth collection explores a series of “word betrayals”-English words misunderstood...

Often the most recognized, even brutal, events in American history are assigned a bifurcated public narrative. We divide historical and cultural life into two camps, often segregated by a politicized, racially divided "Color Line." But how do we privately experience the most troubling features of American...

A retired sheriff and his wife go after their young grandson in a riveting tale of familial love and its unexpected consequences. Let Him Go, Larry Watson’s ninth book, returns to big sky country in mid-century America but, with the pervasive menace of a small town family gone wrong and a shocking...

From celebrated poet Christopher Howell, Love’s Last Number is a series of musings on time’s arrow: on both the relentless march that divides each moment into past, present, and future — before and after — and the ultimately porous and recursive nature of time itself.A soldier remembers limes...

From a celebrated author comes a tale of adventure, suspense, and friendship. Cosmos and Niner have adapted to their life on the street, but they decide to set out on a journey to the beach where they can enjoy the summer weather year-round. Their plan has one hitch: they need money to make the trip....