Our Books
383 Titles
The poems of this debut collection are dispatches from chemotherapy beds and hospitals and the loneliest spaces in the home. They are relentlessly embodied, communicating pain, violence, and loss—and yet they are also erotically, electrically attuned…
Mothers masquerading as witches and sepulchral bellhops who reveal themselves to be fathers: in these poems, nothing is as it seems. Shot through with mournfulness, gorgeously spangled in its language, this National Poetry Series winner illuminates…
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…
When Celia Canby and her husband are killed in a car accident, her aunt Kate and cousin Harriet are left to raise Celia’s daughter. Ten years later, it’s the 1950s, and the three generations of women are being drawn apart by life, loss, and new love…
Widowed, penniless, responsible for her beloved baby boy, and subject to the small-town gossip of Harvester, Minnesota—Nell Stillman’s lot is not an easy one. Yet she finds strength in lasting friendships and in the rich inner life awakened by the…
At the very time we need them most, scientists and the idea of objective knowledge are being bombarded by a well-funded, three-part war on science. This provocative book investigates why and how, and offers compelling solutions to bring us to our…
Twin brothers Amed and Aziz live in the peaceful shade of their family’s orange grove. But when a bomb kills the boys’ grandparents, blood will repay blood—and the war that plagues their country changes their lives forever.
When sixteen-year-old Franklin Starlight is summoned by his ailing father, Eldon, Franklin’s sense of duty clashes with the resentment he feels for his father’s many years of neglect and drinking. But when the two men set out together on one last…
After suffering a devastating accident, rodeo cowboy Joe Willie Wolfchild retires to his family’s ranch to mend. There he meets Aiden, a troubled city teenager, and Claire, his mother—and three damaged people slowly begin to heal together.
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…
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…
Bringing together a wide range of perspectives—industry veterans and provocateurs, writers, editors, and digital mavericks—this collection reflects on the current situation of literary publishing, and provides a road map for the shifting geography of…
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…
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…
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…
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…
This contemporary classic has inspired thousands to embrace their beginnings, no matter how humble, and to fight for the places they love. In language at once colloquial, elegiac, and informative, this memoir catalogues a people and their home—a…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.”
What if the greatest cause of our planet’s dramatic change—humans’ ability to adapt and innovate—also holds the key to our survival? Part science journal, part travelogue, this book tells the story of a journey into the Anthropocene, or Age of Man…
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…
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…
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…
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.
This collection takes the physical, elemental world as its point of inquiry, examining how language arises from landscape. Some of these poems begin with the form of physical objects—a rock, split slate, an egg, a feather—while others emerge from a…
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”…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.