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A new series of world literature

Seedbank

373 Titles

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Poetry
Wayne Miller

These poems exist in the wake of catastrophe: rogue gunmen, debt, hoax bombs, riots, and consumerism all haunt its pages. And yet this collection cuts through pain to open up a way forward, thrumming with pathos and humor, pain and the beauty of…

Poetry
Karen Leona Anderson

In this collection, apparently prosaic documents—recipes and receipts—are transformed into expressions of human identity. From cherry pie to the little black dress to an epidural, these poems show how material objects and expenditures constrain and…

Nonfiction
James P. Lenfestey

As the author approached his thirtieth birthday in a state of acute anxiety, a bookseller prescribed to him a singular literary diet—the poems of a Tang Dynasty hermit named Han-shan. His pilgrimage to Han-shan’s cave decades later comes to life in…

Poetry
Adam Clay

Elegant and contemplative, these poems explore what it means for our lives to change—dwelling on the moments decisions are made, from a move to a new job to the birth of a child, and the repercussions we grow with afterward. This collection stares…

Poetry
Yi Lu

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…

Poetry
Jennifer Willoughby

Incantatory, intimate, and incendiary, the winner of the 2015 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry is filled with explosive wit and humor. Yet even at their most surreal—whether taking as their subject a Kaiser Permanente hospital, Shark Week, or…

Fiction
Seth Kantner

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…

Fiction
Shawn Otto

When John White is caught embezzling, his employer offers him a choice: prison, or participating in corporate sabotage. His decision takes him to a remote reservation in northern Minnesota and down a path of dangerous choices, in a gripping tale of…

Nonfiction
Deni Ellis Béchard

How are bonobos like us, what can they teach us, and how can we save them? Combining elements of travelogue, journalism, and natural history, this incomparably rich book takes readers deep into the Congo to examine these great apes and the people who…

Poetry
Ada Limón

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.”

Poetry
Nancy Reddy

This National Poetry Series winner follows the multiple transformations—both figurative and literal—that accompany adolescence and adulthood, particularly for young women. From Nancy Drew to Cinderella, the familiar yet surprising speakers of these…

Young Readers
James DeVita

Marena struggles to remember what life was like before the Zero Tolerance Party installed listening devices in every home and eliminated difference. But when the new Minister of Education cracks down in her school, Marena decides it’s finally time to…

Nonfiction
Joni Tevis

From a haunted widow’s wildly expanding mansion to atomic test sites in the Nevada desert, the settings of these essays are often places of destruction and loss. And yet this collection transforms these eerie, apocalyptic destinations into sites of…

Poetry
Melissa Kwasny

Inspired by ancient pictograph and petroglyph sites, this collection captures the intersection of the natural world and sacred art. These poems fill this space with new, personal meaning: brief glimpses of starlight suggest the impermanence of life…

Poetry
Sally Keith

These are poems of absence, written in the wake of terrible loss. Addressing death, art, travel, and beauty—assembling a guide to survival in the face of the seemingly insurmountable—this collection finds, in mourning, what it means to survive.

Poetry
Parneshia Jones

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”…

Poetry
Brian Laidlaw

These poems relocate the myth of Echo and Narcissus to the mining town of Hibbing, Minnesota. Drawing inspiration from the high school relationship between Bob Dylan and Echo Helstrom, they do with language what miners have always done to the earth…

Poetry
Eric Pankey

This collection takes as its subject the moment when emotion and energy flood a work of art. Inspired by the work of artists as chronologically and geographically diverse as Brueghel, Anish Kapoor, Caravaggio, and James Turrell, these poems seek not…

Poetry
Michael Bazzett

A woozy logic dominates these poems: a heart can become a buzzing hive of bees, a rooster can trigger a series of bombs, a young man can embrace a city bus as his spirit animal. The winner of the 2014 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry is a…

Fiction
Miriam Karmel

Esther Lustig has led a seemingly conventional life—marriage, two children, a life in suburban Chicago. Now, at the age of eighty-five, she’s left with questions and her memories, as the unforgettable Esther attempts to come to terms with the meaning…

Fiction
Jim Heynen

Modeled after the character sketches of Theophrastus, these stories deftly introduce a series of oddly recognizable individuals. In these brief interactions—moving from a nightly Sad Hour hosted by a bar to the moonlit sandbox of a retired army…

Nonfiction
Alison Hawthorne Deming

What does the disappearance of animals mean for human imagination? With a mixture of humor, reverence, and curiosity, this book paints a vivid portrait of the world that made us, and the wisdom we are losing as so many of its creatures fade away.

Poetry
Sara Eliza Johnson

A handful of blackberries offered from bloodied arms, bee stings likened to pulses of sunlight, a honeycomb of marrow exposed. This National Poetry Series winner pulls shards of tenderness—and a transformative, regenerative force—from a world where…

Poetry
Lee Ann Roripaugh

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…

Nonfiction
William Souder

In the century and a half since John James Audubon’s death, his name has become synonymous with wildlife conservation and natural history. But few people know what a complicated figure he was—or the dramatic story behind The Birds of America—as…

Nonfiction
Amy Leach

These essays take jellyfish, fainting goats, and imperturbable caterpillars as just a few of their many inspirations. Surveying both the tiniest earth dwellers and the most far-flung celestial bodies, this is a book of wonder, one readers cannot help…

Nonfiction
Rafael de Grenade

Inundated by monsoon floods in the winter, baked dry in the summer, and filled with the deadliest animals in the world, Australia’s Stilwater Station seems an unlikely home for a cattle operation. But over the course of one season, a ragged crew of…

Fiction
David Rhodes

After serving time for a dubious conviction, Blake Bookchester must adjust to existence outside prison—as life in Words, Wisconsin, swirls around him. Welcoming readers back to the characters introduced in the beloved Driftless, this novel offers an…

Poetry
Martha Collins

During one month each year, for six years, the author wrote a short poem each day. The resulting six sequences of this masterly collection offer haunting reflections on time, and capture the aching, liminal beauty of one day becoming another.

Fiction
Michael Garriga

This collection of flash fiction asks what motivations have led individuals throughout history—from Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, to Cain and Abel, to John Henry and the steam drill—to risk it all. Taking a broad historical view, but allowing…

Fiction
Murray Farish

A transatlantic journey with a subversive, vaguely threatening bunkmate; a student obsessed with a famous actress; a socially isolated couple who find themselves unable to resist their deviant sexual urges. In these stories, characters teeter on the…

Poetry
Alex Lemon

In unrestrained descriptions of sensory overload and tender meditations on fatherhood and mortality, these poems blur the nebulous line between the personal and the pop-cultural. This is a collection of fireworks and wild emotion, defined by the…