Reading Lists
Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the poems of Worldly Things offer needed guidance on ways forward—toward radical kindness and a socially responsible poetics.
This memoir is a riveting exploration of the contradictions of Black identity in the rural South, asking what it means to be “the rare bird, the oddity.”
A vibrant collection of personal and lyric essays in conversation with archival objects of Black history and memory.
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...
For centuries, the richness of our world’s diverse stories has been widely overlooked by readers of environmental literature. This collection works against this blind spot, exploring the relationship between culture and place, emphasizing the...
Thrown in the Throat is a sex-positive incantation that retextures what it is to write a queer life amidst troubled times.
From celebrated contemporary poets María Baranda and Paul Hoover, an exciting collaborative translation of the canonical poems of San Juan de la Cruz.
For centuries, the richness of our world’s diverse stories has been widely overlooked by readers of environmental literature. This collection works against this blind spot, exploring the relationship between culture and place, emphasizing the...
This timely collection—featuring essays from Wendell Berry, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Bill McKibben, and Rebecca Solnit, among others—challenges the division of human society from the natural world that has often characterized traditional...
By turns poetic and lucid, sinuous and accessible, this verse translation of the Mayan epic—the first of its kind, and the first in the Seedbank series—breathes new life into an essential tale.
This Seedbank series novel is at once a vibrant retelling of the origin story of the Chukchi and a timely parable about the destructive power of human ego.
Spare, earthy, lovely, Stone-Garland offers readers of the Seedbank series its lyric blossoms and subtle weave, a walk through a cemetery that is also a garden.
Rooted in the oral traditions of the Tuvan people, the first novel in Galsan Tschinag’s saga—reissued as a Seedbank title—weaves the timeless story of a boy poised on the cusp of manhood with the tale of a people’s vanishing way of life...
As the Amazon burns, Fábio Zuker shares stories of resistance, self-determination, and kinship with the land.
Translated from the Arabic and introduced by Fady Joudah, You Can Be the Last Leaf draws on two decades of work to present the transcendent and timely US debut of Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat.
From celebrated Belgian author Geneviève Damas, a modern fable about friendship, self-determination, and the power of education.
From celebrated contemporary poets María Baranda and Paul Hoover, an exciting collaborative translation of the canonical poems of San Juan de la Cruz.
From one of Norway’s leading writers, translated into English for the very first time, comes a transatlantic novel of dreams, sacrifice, and transformation set at the turn of the twentieth century.
A bold, engaged new anthology spotlighting the work of contemporary Dutch poets influenced by international cultural exchange and linguistic invention.
One of the most important contemporary poets working in German makes his American debut in this compact, light-footed, and curious dual-language collection.
In these poems, presented in both Portuguese and English, readers find themselves in a darkly comic, sensual, and contradictory world. The author’s unorthodox—even blasphemous—religious sensibility yields something ultimately hopeful: a belief...
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...
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...
In these poems, presented in both Portuguese and English, butcher shops, sex, and machine guns sit in spirited dialogue with language, absence, and time. The resulting collection is varied as well as unified, brilliantly textured and layered.
Written in the third century, this is one of the earliest Chinese works about the use of language, intended for those who wish to engage the art of letters at its deepest levels. In sixteen sections, it discusses the joys and problems that face...
In this anthology, women survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki write of the attack’s cause, effects, and aftermath. In potent prose and poetry, these women bear witness to the shared responsibility for bringing about war, any...
“Birds are my almanac. They tune me into the seasons, and into myself.” So begins this lively collection of essays by acclaimed filmmaker and novelist Priyanka Kumar.
From poet Victoria Chang, a collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations.
From beloved, award-winning poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil comes a debut work of nonfiction—a collection of essays about the natural world, and the way its inhabitants can teach, support, and inspire us.
In building relationships with his former neighbors, Ali explores questions of land and power―and in remembering a lost connection to this place, finally finds a home he might belong to.
Selected by Jos Charles as the winner of the 2021 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, Return Flight is a lush reckoning: with inheritance, with body, with trauma, with desire—and with the many tendons in between.
Ask the Brindled is an intergenerational reclamation of the narratives foisted upon Indigenous and queer Hawaiians.
These poems take a piercing, witty, and ferocious look into the heart of the Fukushima Daiichi plant disaster, showing us survivors, victims, and Tsunami: a force of nature, femme fatale, and “annihilatrix.”
In The Galleons, Rick Barot widens his scope, contextualizing the immigrant journey of his Filipino-American family in the larger history and aftermath of colonialism.
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...
As the young daughter of an affluent Parsee family in Lahore, Lenny is keenly observant of the city’s astonishing diversity—Muslims and Hindus, Christians and Sikhs, coexisting together. But as Lahore descends into sectarian violence, Lenny’s...
Loading his pregnant wife, infant daughter, and widowed mother-in-law into a bullock cart, Faredoon Junglewalla—Freddy for short—leaves his ancestral village for the bustling city of Lahore. Despite the nagging of his unbearable mother-in-law,...
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...
This groundbreaking anthology presents a revelatory portrait of contemporary Vietnamese poetry. What emerges from this conversation of outsiders and insiders, Vietnamese and American voices, is a worldly sensibility descended from the...
Drawing on a dizzying array of sources—including Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Korean folklore, and Turkish proverbs—this winner of the American Book Award explores the entangled myths that accompany the experience of immigration. These poems...
At once ancient and contemporary, personal and political, grounded and yet uniquely dazzling, this extraordinary collection blends Asian and Western sensibilities in a pioneering way. With wit and energy, these poems define the author’s existence...
In this anthology, women survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki write of the attack’s cause, effects, and aftermath. In potent prose and poetry, these women bear witness to the shared responsibility for bringing about war, any...
As approachable as it is profound in exploring the human condition and our shared need for community, this is a story for our times.
Now a Major Motion Picture from Focus Features, Starring Kevin Costner and Diane Lane
From “an important writer in every sense” (David Foster Wallace), a novel that imagines a future in which sweeping civil conflict has forced America’s young people to flee its borders, into an unwelcoming world.
Alone in the world and placed in a horrific boarding school, Saul Indian Horse is surrounded by violence and cruelty, but finds a tentative salvation in hockey.
Tormented by the loss of his wife, department store window-dresser Colton Kemp decides to raise his newborn twins in secrecy and isolation, to become human mannequins.
Animated throughout by a striking beauty and ferocity, A Song from Faraway pieces together “stories we tell about ourselves,” illuminating the human condition and our times.
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...
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...
In this modern classic, the charges of a young Sioux woman force David Hayden’s father, the sheriff of their small town, to confront his older brother, a charming war hero and respected doctor. This novel is an astonishing tale of love and...
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Robin Wall Kimmerer shows how other living beings offer us gifts and lessons.
Alone in the world and placed in a horrific boarding school, Saul Indian Horse is surrounded by violence and cruelty, but finds a tentative salvation in hockey.
Ask the Brindled is an intergenerational reclamation of the narratives foisted upon Indigenous and queer Hawaiians.
This National Poetry Series winner is an unflinching portrait of the actual west—full of beauty as well as brutality, where boys tentatively learn to become, and to love, men.
From the award-winning author of Perma Red comes a devastatingly beautiful novel that challenges prevailing historical narratives of Sacajewea.
A haunting novel spanning several generations, following a Dakota family’s struggle to preserve their way of life and their sacrifices to protect what matters most.
A wild, seductive debut collection that presents a powerful journey of struggle and healing—and a spellbinding brew of folklore, movies, music, and ritual.
“We may not relight the fires that used to burn in our villages, but we can carry the embers from those fires in our hearts and learn to light new fires in a new world.”
Thrillingly written in a series of fractured vignettes, and unflinchingly honest, Mamaskatch is a heartbreaking account of how traumas are passed down from one generation to the next.
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.
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...
These stories evoke a world in which spirits and the living commingle and Sioux culture and modern life collide with disarming power, humor, and joy. The characters grapple with potent forces of family, history, and belief—forces that at times...
This Seedbank series novel is at once a vibrant retelling of the origin story of the Chukchi and a timely parable about the destructive power of human ego.
Rooted in the oral traditions of the Tuvan people, the first novel in Galsan Tschinag’s saga—reissued as a Seedbank title—weaves the timeless story of a boy poised on the cusp of manhood with the tale of a people’s vanishing way of life...