Blog Posts by Milkweed Staff

Sinkhole: A Natural History of a Suicide, my first memoir and venture into prose, was a difficult book to write. Guided by the grief and curiosity surrounding my father’s death by suicide in 2009, the book is an attempt to trace a larger legacy of suicide in my familial line. My father’s death marked the third suicide in my immediate family: both my parents had lost their fathers to suicide, a truth that we rarely acknowledged or discussed. When my father died, I began to wonder what had led to these deaths and what my family’s self-destructive history implied.

We are in the heart of gift-giving season. Summer is turning over to fall and the holidays are approaching. This is one of our favorite times of the year, and many of us on staff are mapping out the gifts we’ll give to our friends, family members, partners, and creative collaborators in the coming months. Books are our favorite gifts to give; they inspire, motivate, instill wonder, challenge, and change the way we see the world.

This year, you may have heard that the book industry is tangled up in global supply chain challenges. We are joining the chorus…

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…