David Rhodes’ farmhouse lies deep in the woods of southwestern Wisconsin. So deep that I thought I might never find it when I went there to visit the Rhodes family a few weeks ago. That’s how David prefers it. He finds beauty and peace in seclusion. Sure, he’s able to work a room full of people like nobody else can, making people laugh with his quick wit or a knowing glance. But then he retreats to his home where he reads and writes for much of the day.

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You probably know someone like Esther Lustig. She might be your grandmother, your best friend, or the kind woman who lives down the hall. She’s modest and charming and still trying new hobbies, but she quietly struggles with her age. She misses old friends, aches in the morning, misplaces her purse too often. And yet, for the extraordinary woman sketched by Miriam Karmel in Being Esther, life is much more than the sum of its losses, even for an octogenarian.

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For the staff of Milkweed Editions, the only thing our mothers love as much as their children are the books we publish. Since Mother’s Day is this weekend and we’re offering a discount of 30 percent on all of our books through Sunday (with the discount code “FORMOM”), we thought we’d give you a few recommendations for books we know our own mothers would like.

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In her stunning debut collection, The Hundred Grasses, Leila Wilson locates her poems’ subjects within the midst of open spaces: the Midwestern lawns, lakes, fields, and creeks of her childhood; the Dutch farms, canals, and seascapes near her family’s home in Holland. With poems that shape sounds culled from the empty spaces they inhabit, Wilson animates what is seemingly static—stillness becoming not absence but fullness, sense flooding into life’s silences.

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In poems brilliantly textured and layered, Salgado Maranhão integrates socio-political thought with subjects abstractly metaphysical. Concrete collides with conceptual—butcher shops, sex, and machine guns in conversation with language, absence, and time—resulting in a collection varied as well as unified, an aesthetic at once traditional and postmodern. In this conversation with Maranhão and Alexis Levitin, his translator, we consider the origins of the poems in Blood of the Sun, and the challenges of bringing the musicality and nuance of the original Portuguese to life in English.

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