Yalie Saweda Kamara’s Besaydoo is an elegantly wrought love song to home—as place, as people, as body, and as language. Yalie Saweda Kamara writes for a new America, where praise is plentiful and Black lives flourish.
Reading Lists
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A vibrant collection of personal and lyric essays in conversation with archival objects of Black history and memory.
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A polyphonic new entry in Multiverse, JJJJJerome Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies beautifully rewrites history, creating a world that blooms backward, reimagining what it means for Black and disabled people to have taken, and to continue to take, their…
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Ama Codjoe’s highly anticipated debut collection brings generous light to the inner dialogues of women as they bathe, create art, make and lose love. Each poem rises with the urgency of a fully awakened sensual life.
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Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the poems of Worldly Things offer needed guidance on ways forward—toward radical kindness and a socially responsible poetics.
- A visionary anthology of climate fiction from Grist.
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This memoir is a riveting exploration of the contradictions of Black identity in the rural South, asking what it means to be “the rare bird, the oddity.”
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Tracing the author’s journey from the tropical forests of Trinidad to the stark landscape of rural Canada—as well as that of his personal, musical metamorphosis—this is a poignant memoir of overcoming and belonging.
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From the Bahamas, London, and Cairo, to Minnesota and Georgia—and from the intimate messages of the heart to the global immigration of African Americans—these poems explore with urgency the relationships among travel, alienation, and home. Part…
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For centuries, the richness of our world’s diverse stories has been widely overlooked by readers of environmental literature. This collection works against this blind spot, exploring the relationship between culture and place, emphasizing the lasting…
- An intimate and kaleidoscopic entry in the Multiverse series that excavates survival, storytelling, and coming to terms with an unruly mind.
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Affectionate, dynamic, and uncommonly observant, this collection mines the richness of history to create a map of identity and influence. In the South, “lard sizzles a sermon from the stove”; in Chicago, we feast on an “opera of peppers and pimento”…
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A multicultural anthology about the enduring importance and shifting associations of the hearth in our world.
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21|19 offers a re-reading of the “American Renaissance” and new possibilities for imaginative critical practice today.
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An NPR “Book We Love”
An Indie Next Selection for May 2022
A TIME Magazine “Must Read Book of 2022”
An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. -
From U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón comes The Carrying—her most powerful collection yet.
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From U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things examines the dangerous thrill of living in a world you must leave one day and the search to find something that is “disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.”
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From U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, an extraordinary collection—at once urbane and earthy—that navigates the thoroughfares and tributaries of human nature.
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This Jake Adam York Prize winner is a vivid portrait of the artist as a young woman. At every step, these poems seduce with history, folklore, and sensory detail.
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Thrown in the Throat is a sex-positive incantation that retextures what it is to write a queer life amidst troubled times.
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From celebrated contemporary poets María Baranda and Paul Hoover, an exciting collaborative translation of the canonical poems of San Juan de la Cruz.
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A multicultural anthology about the enduring importance and shifting associations of the hearth in our world.
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When Tom Serafino’s twin sister, Teagan, suffers a debilitating brain injury, a police investigation implicates his playmate’s uncle, Shoe. Innocent of the crime but burdened by his own childhood tragedy, Shoe takes the blame—inviting the question of…
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21|19 offers a re-reading of the “American Renaissance” and new possibilities for imaginative critical practice today.
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For centuries, the richness of our world’s diverse stories has been widely overlooked by readers of environmental literature. This collection works against this blind spot, exploring the relationship between culture and place, emphasizing the lasting…
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This timely collection—featuring essays from Wendell Berry, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Bill McKibben, and Rebecca Solnit, among others—challenges the division of human society from the natural world that has often characterized traditional…
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By turns poetic and lucid, sinuous and accessible, this verse translation of the Mayan epic—the first of its kind, and the first in the Seedbank series—breathes new life into an essential tale.
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As the Amazon burns, Fábio Zuker shares stories of resistance, self-determination, and kinship with the land.
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Translated from the Arabic and introduced by Fady Joudah, You Can Be the Last Leaf draws on two decades of work to present the transcendent and timely US debut of Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat.
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The latest in the Seedbank series, the debut in English of a groundbreaking Indigenous poet of the Americas. Steely lyrics fuse cosmology, lineage, feminism, and environmental activism into a singular body of work that stands for the self and the…
- An authoritative volume representing the vast oeuvre of one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant and visionary poets.
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This Seedbank series novel is at once a vibrant retelling of the origin story of the Chukchi and a timely parable about the destructive power of human ego.
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A masterful bilingual collection of poems rooted in K’iche’ Maya culture illustrating all the ways meaning manifests within our world, and how best to behold it.
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Spare, earthy, lovely, Stone-Garland offers readers of the Seedbank series its lyric blossoms and subtle weave, a walk through a cemetery that is also a garden.
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The North American debut of Tuệ Sỹ—poet, monk, scholar, dissident, and one of the great cultural figures of modern Vietnam—and a new bilingual edition to the Seedbank series.
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Acclaimed poet and translator Dan Beachy-Quick offers this new addition to the Seedbank series: a warm, vivid rendering of the earliest Greek intellects, inviting us to reconsider writing, and thinking, as a way of living meaningfully in the world.
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Rooted in the oral traditions of the Tuvan people, the first novel in Galsan Tschinag’s saga—reissued as a Seedbank title—weaves the timeless story of a boy poised on the cusp of manhood with the tale of a people’s vanishing way of life.
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The latest in the Seedbank series, the debut in English of a groundbreaking Indigenous poet of the Americas. Steely lyrics fuse cosmology, lineage, feminism, and environmental activism into a singular body of work that stands for the self and the…
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From celebrated Belgian author Geneviève Damas, a modern fable about friendship, self-determination, and the power of education.
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From celebrated contemporary poets María Baranda and Paul Hoover, an exciting collaborative translation of the canonical poems of San Juan de la Cruz.
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From one of Norway’s leading writers, translated into English for the very first time, comes a transatlantic novel of dreams, sacrifice, and transformation set at the turn of the twentieth century.
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A bold, engaged new anthology spotlighting the work of contemporary Dutch poets influenced by international cultural exchange and linguistic invention.
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One of the most important contemporary poets working in German makes his American debut in this compact, light-footed, and curious dual-language collection.
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In these poems, presented in both Portuguese and English, readers find themselves in a darkly comic, sensual, and contradictory world. The author’s unorthodox—even blasphemous—religious sensibility yields something ultimately hopeful: a belief that…
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The sea is an impossible force in this collection: it is both a majestic presence that predates man, and something to carry with us wherever we go. These brilliantly translated poems, presented in both Chinese and English, introduce an important…
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Simultaneously occupying past, present, and future, this collection suffuses image with memory and darkness with abundant light. In these masterful translations—printed alongside the original Vietnamese—the poems sing out with the wisdom that comes…
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In these poems, presented in both Portuguese and English, butcher shops, sex, and machine guns sit in spirited dialogue with language, absence, and time. The resulting collection is varied as well as unified, brilliantly textured and layered.
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Written in the third century, this is one of the earliest Chinese works about the use of language, intended for those who wish to engage the art of letters at its deepest levels. In sixteen sections, it discusses the joys and problems that face both…
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In this anthology, women survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki write of the attack’s cause, effects, and aftermath. In potent prose and poetry, these women bear witness to the shared responsibility for bringing about war, any war…
- Beloved author Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s celebrated work of nonfiction, now including additional essays and illustrations in paperback.
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“Birds are my almanac. They tune me into the seasons, and into myself.” So begins this lively collection of essays by acclaimed filmmaker and novelist Priyanka Kumar.
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From poet Victoria Chang, a collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations.
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A marvelous debut novel exploring the fractures caused by the Partition of India, as well as the legacy and contemporary parallels of sectarian violence around the world.
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In building relationships with his former neighbors, Ali explores questions of land and power―and in remembering a lost connection to this place, finally finds a home he might belong to.
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Ask the Brindled is an intergenerational reclamation of the narratives foisted upon Indigenous and queer Hawaiians.
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Selected by Jos Charles as the winner of the 2021 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, Return Flight is a lush reckoning: with inheritance, with body, with trauma, with desire—and with the many tendons in between.
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These poems take a piercing, witty, and ferocious look into the heart of the Fukushima Daiichi plant disaster, showing us survivors, victims, and Tsunami: a force of nature, femme fatale, and “annihilatrix.”
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This collection offers a singular perspective on our nation of immigrants and the tensions pulsing in the margins where they live and work.
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In The Galleons, Rick Barot widens his scope, contextualizing the immigrant journey of his Filipino-American family in the larger history and aftermath of colonialism.
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Tula: a ruined Toltec capital; a Russian city known for its accordions; Tagalog for “poem.” Inspired by the experiences of the second-generation immigrant who does not fully acquire the language of his parents, the winner of the 2016 Lindquist &…
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Heian-period Japanese women writers, science fiction, and the author’s own experience as a second-generation immigrant: these are some of the sources these poems use to explore the connection between identity and language. Wonderfully lyrical and…
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From the intersection of Onondaga, Japanese, Cuban, and Appalachian cultures, this collection arrives brimming with personal and political histories.
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The sea is an impossible force in this collection: it is both a majestic presence that predates man, and something to carry with us wherever we go. These brilliantly translated poems, presented in both Chinese and English, introduce an important…
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When Tom Serafino’s twin sister, Teagan, suffers a debilitating brain injury, a police investigation implicates his playmate’s uncle, Shoe. Innocent of the crime but burdened by his own childhood tragedy, Shoe takes the blame—inviting the question of…
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This groundbreaking anthology presents a revelatory portrait of contemporary Vietnamese poetry. What emerges from this conversation of outsiders and insiders, Vietnamese and American voices, is a worldly sensibility descended from the geographical…
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Drawing on a dizzying array of sources—including Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Korean folklore, and Turkish proverbs—this winner of the American Book Award explores the entangled myths that accompany the experience of immigration. These poems reveal a…
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Bold, passionate, and more urgent than ever, Debra Magpie Earling’s powerful classic novel is reborn in this new edition.
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As approachable as it is profound in exploring the human condition and our shared need for community, this is a story for our times.
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Now a Major Motion Picture from Focus Features, Starring Kevin Costner and Diane Lane
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A fable both blistering and surreal, this is a propulsive, funny, and thought-provoking novel about a woman in isolation, whose mind—fueled by capitalism, motherhood, and the search for meaningful art—attempts to betray her.
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From “an important writer in every sense” (David Foster Wallace), a novel that imagines a future in which sweeping civil conflict has forced America’s young people to flee its borders, into an unwelcoming world.
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From Deirdre McNamer, a masterful exploration of the rich and hidden facets of human character, as illuminated by the mysterious connections among the residents of a senior residence in Montana.
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Alone in the world and placed in a horrific boarding school, Saul Indian Horse is surrounded by violence and cruelty, but finds a tentative salvation in hockey.
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Tormented by the loss of his wife, department store window-dresser Colton Kemp decides to raise his newborn twins in secrecy and isolation, to become human mannequins.
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Animated throughout by a striking beauty and ferocity, A Song from Faraway pieces together “stories we tell about ourselves,” illuminating the human condition and our times.
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When a car explodes in Kabul ten years after 9/11, a journalist discovers that its passengers—three fellow ex-pats—had formed an unlikely love triangle. As the journalist learns more, the narratives of their lives become inseparable from the story of…
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Born and raised in the Arctic, Cutuk Hawcley has learned to provide for himself by hunting, fishing, and trading. But when he leaves for the city as a young man, incompatible realities collide, forcing Cutuk to choose between two worlds—both…
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In this modern classic, the charges of a young Sioux woman force David Hayden’s father, the sheriff of their small town, to confront his older brother, a charming war hero and respected doctor. This novel is an astonishing tale of love and courage…
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From the award-winning author of Perma Red comes a devastatingly beautiful novel that challenges prevailing historical narratives of Sacajewea.
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Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Robin Wall Kimmerer shows how other living beings offer us gifts and lessons.
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Bold, passionate, and more urgent than ever, Debra Magpie Earling’s powerful classic novel is reborn in this new edition.
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“We may not relight the fires that used to burn in our villages, but we can carry the embers from those fires in our hearts and learn to light new fires in a new world.”
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A wild, seductive debut collection that presents a powerful journey of struggle and healing—and a spellbinding brew of folklore, movies, music, and ritual.
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Ask the Brindled is an intergenerational reclamation of the narratives foisted upon Indigenous and queer Hawaiians.
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Alone in the world and placed in a horrific boarding school, Saul Indian Horse is surrounded by violence and cruelty, but finds a tentative salvation in hockey.
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The latest in the Seedbank series, the debut in English of a groundbreaking Indigenous poet of the Americas. Steely lyrics fuse cosmology, lineage, feminism, and environmental activism into a singular body of work that stands for the self and the…
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A haunting novel spanning several generations, following a Dakota family’s struggle to preserve their way of life and their sacrifices to protect what matters most.
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This National Poetry Series winner is an unflinching portrait of the actual west—full of beauty as well as brutality, where boys tentatively learn to become, and to love, men.
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Thrillingly written in a series of fractured vignettes, and unflinchingly honest, Mamaskatch is a heartbreaking account of how traumas are passed down from one generation to the next.
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Following his award-winning debut memoir, Mamaskatch, which masterfully portrayed a Cree coming-of-age in rural Canada, Darrel J. McLeod continues the poignant story of his adulthood.
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These stories evoke a world in which spirits and the living commingle and Sioux culture and modern life collide with disarming power, humor, and joy. The characters grapple with potent forces of family, history, and belief—forces that at times dare…
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This Seedbank series novel is at once a vibrant retelling of the origin story of the Chukchi and a timely parable about the destructive power of human ego.
-
Rooted in the oral traditions of the Tuvan people, the first novel in Galsan Tschinag’s saga—reissued as a Seedbank title—weaves the timeless story of a boy poised on the cusp of manhood with the tale of a people’s vanishing way of life.