Reading Lists
A vibrant collection of personal and lyric essays in conversation with archival objects of Black history and memory.
As a farmer with decades spent working in fields, Scott Chaskey has been shaped by daily attention to the earth. A leader in the international Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, he has combined a longstanding commitment to...
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.
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.
An NPR "Book We Love"
A BookRiot "Best Book of the Year"
An Indie Next Selection for May 2022
A Los Angeles Times Recommended Read for May 2022
A TIME Magazine “Must Read Book of 2022”
...
Spending time in wild places with their children, Chris Dombrowski learns that their youthful sense of wonder at the beauty and connectivity of the more-than-human world is not naivete to be shed, but rather wisdom most of us lose along...
“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 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.
To Make Room for the Sea reckons with the notion that nothing in this world is permanent.
A thoughtful new collection of poems, one that deconstructs the deceptively simple question of what it means to be good—a good person, a good citizen, a good teacher, a good poet, a good father.
From sixteen-year-old Dara McAnulty, a globally renowned figure in the youth climate activist movement, comes a memoir about loving the natural world and fighting to save it.
As the Amazon burns, Fábio Zuker shares stories of resistance, self-determination, and kinship with the land.
In Thin Places, a luminous blend of memoir, history, and nature writing, Kerri ní Dochartaigh explores how nature kept her sane and helped her heal after The Troubles.
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.
From Margaret Renkl comes an unusual, captivating portrait of a family—and of the cycles of joy and grief that inscribe human lives within the natural world.
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.
This is the story of the Freeman's year bearing witness to wild places and a passionate argument for the value of wilderness, told in visceral, immediate language and gorgeous photos.
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.
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.
A polyphonic new entry in Multiverse, JJJJJerome Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies beautifully extends a “lyrical celebration of and inquiry into the intersections of blackness, music, and disabled speech” (Claudia Rankine).
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.”
Ama Codjoe’s highly anticipated debut collection brings generous light to the inner dialogues of women as they bathe, create art, make and lose love. Each poem rises with the urgency of a fully awakened sensual life.
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...
An NPR "Book We Love"
A BookRiot "Best Book of the Year"
An Indie Next Selection for May 2022
A Los Angeles Times Recommended Read for May 2022
A TIME Magazine “Must Read Book of 2022”
...
From U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón comes The Carrying—her most powerful collection yet.
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.”
From U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, an extraordinary collection—at once urbane and earthy—that navigates the thoroughfares and tributaries of human nature.
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.
The North American debut of Tuệ Sỹ—poet, monk, scholar, dissident, and one of the great cultural figures of modern Vietnam—and a new bilingual edition to the Seedbank series.
Acclaimed poet and translator Dan Beachy-Quick offers this newest addition to the Seedbank series: a warm, vivid rendering of the earliest Greek intellects, inviting us to reconsider writing, and thinking, as a way of living meaningfully...
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...
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.
“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.
A marvelous debut novel exploring the fractures caused by the Partition of India, as well as the legacy and contemporary parallels of sectarian violence around the world.
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.
Ask the Brindled is an intergenerational reclamation of the narratives foisted upon Indigenous and queer Hawaiians.
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.
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...