Our Books

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.

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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…

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…

From the Bahamas, London, and Cairo, to Minnesota and Georgia—and from the intimate messages of the heart to the global immigration of African Americans—these poems explore with urgency the relationships among travel, alienation, and home. Part…

Sweden has long been home to a rich and luminous poetic tradition, notable for refreshing openness, striking honesty, and a rare transcendence that often springs from a keen attention to the natural world. This breathtaking anthology brings together…

The winner of the 2013 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry probes the depths of the human psyche. These are poems spoken through and for the melancholic, the hysteric, the body dysmorphic—from Mary Glover to Lavinia Dickinson to Freud’s famed patient…

Simultaneously occupying past, present, and future, this collection suffuses image with memory and darkness with abundant light. In these masterful translations—printed alongside the original Vietnamese—the poems sing out with the wisdom that comes…

When Eugenie de La Roque and her family flee the French Revolution for the wilderness of Pennsylvania, Hannah Kimbrell is chosen to help prepare for their arrival—leading to an unlikely friendship between the aristocrat and the Quaker. This novel is…