Blog Posts tagged with "Poetry"

Hello, friends, and welcome to another edition of Deep Cuts. In this series, we’ll be diving in with some of our authors and discussing the behind-the-scenes work that goes into the composition and production of their books. Oh, and real quick: this is Bailey Hutchinson, and I’m honored to be taking up the curatorial mantle for Julian Randall, the inaugural Milkweed Fellow, who created this series.

Friends, I’m feeling strange, and that’s in no small part because I’ve been alone in my apartment for over three weeks. It’s likely many of you find yourselves in a similar situation: self-isolation, while…

Happy December fellow readers, and welcome to another edition of Deep Cuts! In this series I have the privilege of diving in with the author of a compelling Milkweed title and discussing the behind-the-scenes work that goes into the composition and production of their book.

This month, we’re highlighting Sarah Ruhl and Max Ritvo’s collaborative book, Letters from Max: A Poet, A Teacher, A Friendship, which we released in paperback in September. We know this book has had an enormous impact on readers’ lives. Spanning four years of Sarah’s and Max’s lives, Letters from Max explores illness, art, spirituality…

For her manuscript The Clearing, chosen by acclaimed poet and judge Henri Cole, Adair will receive $10,000 and publication by Milkweed Editions in June 2020.

Upon accepting the National Book Critics Circle Award, Ada Limón delivered a powerful speech about women and community. Read the full speech here.

We are pleased to announce that judge Mark Doty has selected Brooke Matson’s collection In Accelerated Silence as winner of the next Jake Adam York Prize, presented in partnership by Copper Nickel and Milkweed Editions. Matson will receive $2,000 and her collection will be published by Milkweed in February 2020.

Milkweed Editions is pleased to announce that the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, the largest regional poetry prize in the country, will continue under a new name, the Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry. The prize will also offer expanded eligibility, adding Michigan to the list of eligible states of residence for entrants in the upper Midwest. The 2019 judge will be acclaimed poet, essayist, and literary translator, Khaled Mattawa.

For his manuscript The Milk Hours, chosen by acclaimed poet and judge Henri Cole, James will receive $10,000 and publication by Milkweed Editions in June 2019.

Max Ritvo began as my student. I met Max when he was a senior at Yale. This is how he began his application to get into my playwriting workshop: Dear Professor Ruhl, Thanks for reading this application. My name is Max Ritvo—I’m a senior English major in the Creative Writing Concentration. All I want to do is write. His application said that he was a poet and a comedian, part of an experimental comedy troupe. A poet and he’s funny? Huh. I reread his application, which had been left to stew in the “no” pile because he’d never written a play before. And because funny poets are a rare and wonderful species of human being, I moved Max to the “yes” pile, despite his lack of experience writing plays. It is hard to imagine now that Max’s application could ever have remained in any other pile—a strange parallel universe in which I never met Max.

Max Ritvo was a prodigiously gifted poet; toward the end of his life, he was also volcanically productive. Nothing he wrote was without flashes of brilliance, but many of these late poems would surely have been revised or jettisoned; it was slow work to sift out the very best. This he asked me to do—it seemed to me an essential labor lest the weaker poems dilute the stronger. What follows, obviously, reflects my judgment. Nothing has been revised; Elizabeth Metzger, Max’s designated literary executor, suggested one minute cut. Cancer was Max’s tragedy; it was also, as he was canny enough to see, his opportunity. Poets who die at twenty-five do not commonly leave bodies of work so urgent, so daring, so supple, so desperately alive.

From the author of Bright Dead Things comes The Carrying, her most powerful collection yet. And now, for the first time, we’re thrilled to share Limón’s entire collection in audiobook. Listen to a preview here.