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Poetry
Jody Gladding

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...

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...

The Stuntman
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...

Crow-Work
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...

You Must Remember This
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...

Ordinary Sins
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...

Zoologies
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...

Dandarians
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...

Things that Are
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...

Stilwater
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...

Jewelweed
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...

Day Unto Day
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.

The Book of Duels
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...

Inappropriate Behavior
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 Wish Book
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...

Dangerous Goods
Poetry
Sean Hill

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...

The Star By My Head
Poetry
Malena Mörling and Jonas Ellerström

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...

Glass Armonica
Poetry
Rebecca Dunham

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...

Black Stars
Poetry
Ngo Tu Lap

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...

Waiting for the Queen
Young Readers
Joanna Higgins

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...

Sillhouette of a Sparrow
Young Readers
Molly Beth Griffin

Growing up in the 1920s, Garnet Richardson watches the birds outside her window, admiring their freedom and beauty. When Garnet is sent away to a lakeside resort town for the summer, she discovers a chance to finally spread her wings, and her...

Her Book
Poetry
Éireann Lorsung

Full of youth, wonder, and imagination, this collection crosses distances and generations to celebrate the lives of women, and the bonds that bring them together. In these poems, the female body rises from a foundation of stars; songbirds are cut...

Often the most recognized, even brutal, events in American history are segregated by a politicized, racially divided “Color Line.” But where—asks this intense and ambitious National Poetry Series winner—is the Color Line in the mind, in the body...

I Will Not Leave You Comfortless
Nonfiction
Jeremy Jackson

In 1984, the eleventh year of his life, the author experienced his first love, the loss of his grandmother, and his sister’s departure for collegeseemingly ordinary events that eroded his innocence in a way that was never to be fully...

Apology
Fiction
Jon Pineda

When Tom Serafino’s twin sister, Teagan, suffers a debilitating brain injury, a police investigation implicates his playmate’s uncle, Shoe. Innocent of the crime but burdened by his own childhood tragedy, Shoe takes the blame—inviting the...

The Hundred Grasses
Poetry
Leila Wilson

These are poems rooted in the flatlands and lowlands: the Midwestern lawns, fields, lakes, and creeks of the author’s childhood, and the farms, canals, and seascapes near her family home’s in Holland. And from these seemingly empty spaces—and the...

Siege 13
Fiction
Tamas Dobozy

In the fall of 1944, the Red Army encircled Budapest, and the ensuing months witnessed one of the most brutal sieges of World War II. Richly grounded in this historical trauma and its extended aftermath, the stories in this collection illuminate...

Trace
Poetry
Eric Pankey

Navigating both depression and the search for inspiration, this collection sits at the threshold between faith and doubt, the visible and the invisible, the physical and the metaphysical. These poems find us at our most vulnerable, the moment...

Odessa
Poetry
Patricia Kirkpatrick

A grim prognosis, brain cancer, leaves the speaker in this collection fighting for her life. The winner of the 2012 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry creates from loss a dreamlike reality: Odessa, “roof of the underworld,” a refuge at once...

Fiction on a Stick
Fiction
Daniel Slager

Originally published as the state marked its sesquicentennial in 2008, this anthology suggests what residents of the state have known for some time: Minnesota has changed enormously since 1858. Rich, compelling, and often surprising, these pieces...

Fiction
Bapsi Sidhwa

Wild, austere, and magnificently beautiful, the territories of northern Pakistan are a forbidding place. When a young bride from Lahore arrives in these mountains, the ancient customs of unquestioning obedience and backbreaking work make...

The Fact of the Matter
Poetry
Sally Keith

This collection shows the self as a crucible of force—that which compels us to exert ourselves upon the world, and meanwhile renders us vulnerable to it. From Robert Smithson’s colossal Spiral Jetty to a train hurdling along the west-reaching...

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