Blog Posts by Milkweed Staff

Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief by Victoria Chang

Dear Mother,

I have so many questions. What city were you born in? What was your American birthday? Your Chinese birthday? What did your mother do? What did your grandmother do? Who was your father, grandfather? It’s too late now. But I would like to know.

I would like to know why your mother followed Chiang Kai-shek, taking you and your six (or seven?) siblings across China to Taiwan. I would like to know what was said in the planning meeting. I would like to know who was…

We are thrilled to announce that Noʻu Revilla has been named one of five winners of the National Poetry Series for 2021. Her manuscript Ask the Brindled was selected by Milkweed poet Rick Barot and will be published in August 2022. In addition to publication, Revilla will receive $10,000.

Noʻu Revilla is an ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) queer poet and educator. Born and raised in Waiʻehu on the island of Maui, she currently lives and loves in the valley of Pālolo on the island of Oʻahu. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Poetry, Literary Hub, Anomaly, Beloit…

We are excited to announce that our Publisher & CEO Daniel Slager has acquired three books from award-winning poet and newly appointed host for the critically acclaimed podcast The Slowdown Ada Limón.

Essay by Elizabeth Metzger

The night we met in Dorothea Lasky’s workshop at Columbia, Max Ritvo and I shared a taxi across the park where we were both living. I had recognized Max’s genius in the classroom, but it wasn’t until the cab ride after that I learned two defining things about Max: He was a performer by nature, and he was dying. I remember having trouble reconciling my impressions of him as an ebullient, whimsical life force breaking into song, holding my eyes on his for dramatically long spells with my understanding of the cold, lucid facts of his…

We are excited and humbled to announce a new literary series, Multiverse, and the first book in the series, Hannah Emerson’s The Kissing of Kissing, out April 2022.

MULTIVERSE

Multiverse is a literary series devoted to different ways of languaging, curated by neurodivergent poet Chris Martin, and featuring a chorus of editorial voices. Multiverse primarily emerges from the practices and creativity of neurodivergent, autistic, neuroqueer, mad, nonspeaking, and disabled cultures. The desire of Multiverse is to serially surface multiple universes of underheard language that might intersect, resonate, and aggregate toward liberatory futures. In other words, each book in the…

by: Fábio Zuker

ENGLISH

A whale in the amazon forest: a cover image story

“Space and time move in mutual dependence. It’s as if rivers, lakes, and forests can slow or even halt the passage of time as it’s traditionally conceived: an arrow shot across a smooth surface. It’s not like a car driving down the road. In the Amazon, time will take its time, at least as long as there are rivers and forests.”

I decided to quote an excerpt from my book, The Life and Death of a Minke Whale and Other Stories of the Brazilian Rainforest—which…

by Kerri ní Dochartaigh

When someone writes a book about anything the first thing they are often asked is: HOW?

How did you find the time, the topic, the means to get it out of your insides and into the outside world for all to see? When someone writes a book that takes as its subject matter their own personal lived experiences – those which might range from deeply unsettling – to upsetting – or even traumatising; perhaps the question most commonly asked is: WHY?

Why would you put yourself through it? Why would you unearth that pain? Why would…

Milkweed Editions is thrilled to announce that Jennifer Huang has won the 2021 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry. For their poetry collection Return Flight, selected by Jos Charles, Huang will receive $10,000 and publication by Milkweed Editions in January 2022.

Jennifer Huang was born in Maryland to Taiwanese immigrants and has since called many places her home. Their poems have appeared in POETRY, The Rumpus, and Narrative Magazine, among other places; and they have received recognition from the Academy of American Poets, North American Taiwan Studies Association, and more. In 2020, Huang earned…

A great deal of Dutch poetry nowadays is influenced by urban tendencies, by movies, by social media, by elements of the news. Earlier generations often focused on nature, that traditional source of consolation for modern man who has lost his religious faith and paradise. This tendency also means that most younger poets do not strive any longer for unity behind all diversity, for calming the chaos, for a symbolist view on reality; on the contrary, they emphasize pluriformity, changes of registers, they prefer the prismatic glance of diversity.

 Also quite striking is the renewal of language in Dutch poetry seen…

by Victoria Chang

The cover for Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, emerged organically, in the same way that this book emerged. After my mother died, there was the obvious grieving of my mother as body, as mind, as caretaker, but I was surprised to feel a greater sense of loss–a loss of not only her history but my own history. When she died, my connection to and with my family’s Chinese and Taiwanese culture evaporated. Because my mother tended toward secrets, I didn’t know much about her history, and never cared too much before about…