Our Blog

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…

We are excited to welcome three Editors-at-Large to Milkweed Editions, and along with one of these editors, a new literary series.

A LETTER FROM OUR PUBLISHER & CEO, DANIEL SLAGER

Over the years, I have often asked writers we are publishing to recommend other writers and manuscripts. Countless new relationships and projects have come to us as a result, and so when I thought of ways to expand the range of curatorial and editorial perspectives at work in building our publishing program, the notion of adding Editors-at-Large struck me as a natural outgrowth – a formalization, perhaps more precisely –…

Author Arra Lynn Ross reminisces on the inspiration for the cover of her forthcoming collection, Day of the Child.

Hello again, friends! It’s time for round two of our National Poetry Month feature (check out part one here).

For our second installment, I touched base with a few well-loved poets whose books are entering the world again as paberbacks. I’m thrilled that Grady Chambers, John James, and Ada Limón shared their thoughts (and voices) with us to discuss the process of putting together a poetry collection, as well as the power of poetry-out-loud. Listen to audio of them reading from their collections below!

Note: for best listening experience, please use Google Chrome.

“A Story About the Moon” from North…

Hello, friends! Welcome to a very special edition of 5 Reasons to Teach This Book. This month, we’re taking a break from our standard five-question, solo-author interview format; instead, we’re taking a stroll with a few different poets through new books and returning favorites in Milkweed’s 2021 poetry lineup. And oh, hey, look at that—it’s National Poetry Month! Why not celebrate by listening to each of these striking poets read from their collections?

We’re starting off this two-part feature with Wayne Miller, Kathryn Smith, and Robert VanderMolen, each of whom have new books out now (or soon!) with Milkweed. Each collection has…

Hello, friends, and welcome to another edition of Deep Cuts! In this series, we dive in with some of our authors and discuss the behind-the-scenes work that goes into the composition and production of their books. This month, I’m so pleased to be featuring Kazim Ali’s Northern Light, a ruminative study of the word home.

Northern Light opens with a photo of a young, smiling Ali. He’s standing at the end of one of three rows of children—Jenpeg School’s ‘77-‘78 class of first graders. I’ve found myself lingering on this page, studying the various expressions marking the children’s faces…

ANNOUNCING THE WINNER OF THE 2020–21 JAKE ADAM YORK PRIZE!

Copper Nickel and Milkweed Editions are thrilled to announce that judge Randall Mann has chosen Brian Tierney’s book Rise and Float as the winner of the 2020–21 Jake Adam York Prize. Rise and Float will be published by Milkweed Editions in February, 2022, and Tierney will receive $2,000.

Brian Tierney’s poetry appears in Agni, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and a graduate of the Bennington College MFA Writing…

What is home? The house you grew up in? Your hometown? Where-ever your family stays?

When I was 11 everything I thought I knew about home and who I was disappeared. I went to sleep in a rainforest and woke up in a blizzard. I moved from Southern Trinidad in the Caribbean Sea to Northern Ontario, Canada. My grandmother Miss Excelly, who was my whole universe, was gone. The way people looked and spoke, the assumptions they made, were all gone. My place in the world was gone. And everything that followed was a mad scramble to find a way back to a sense of belonging.

Saga Boy is my return back to that place. This is a memoir of my scattered family, of colonialism, of childhood trauma, of blackness, of placelessness, and of an old lady’s prayers living far beyond her life. I travelled through North America, shared stages with rock stars, took meetings with tech tycoons, and changed my name many times in pursuit of the elusive sense of arrival. And there is still a little boy inside me. He is still in the jungle, running through the bush, singing her songs, with a guava wood scepter and a hibiscus crown. This book is the alchemy of his experience. The saga of a boy returning home.

—Antonio Michael Downing, author of Saga Boy: My Life of Blackness and Becoming

Welcome, friends, to the latest installment of 5 Reasons to Teach This Book! In this interview series, we examine what we can learn from Milkweed’s titles by discussing our books with educators, authors, and booksellers. This month, we’re delighted to feature an incandescent conversation between Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley and Milkweed Fellow Tijqua Daiker. Read on to learn more about Kingsley’s upcoming poetry collection, Dēmos: An American Multitude, out in March!

Tijqua Daiker: I’m endlessly intrigued by the poems in this collection that appear in the form of Punnett squares. It speaks to the science of identity, which has…