Reading Lists
A vibrant collection of personal and lyric essays in conversation with archival objects of Black history and memory.
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.
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).
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...
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...
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...
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,
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...
A devastating memoir that sheds urgent, bracingly honest light on both the taboos surrounding disability and the limits of medical science.
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 poet Victoria Chang, a collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations.
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.”
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.
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.
Orr articulates his journey in language as lyrical as it is authentic, gifting us all with a singular tale of survival, and of the transformation of suffering into art.
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...
Feed a fever, starve a cold, but what do we do for cancer? Generous and bittersweet, these essays ponder the intimate connections between food, family, and illness.
When a New Jersey native moves to Minnesota, she discovers a local food movement strong enough to survive the toughest winter. Fascinating and heartfelt, this memoir demonstrates that even in a place with a short growing season, food grown...
When young Deni’s mother leaves his charismatic father, the boy learns of his father’s true identity: André Béchard was once a bank robber—and so Deni’s imagination is set on fire. This deeply affecting memoir is at once a highly unconventional...
A trip becomes an odyssey of self-discovery. Written in gritty, honest prose, Canoeing with José is a remarkable journey.
In this beautiful, evocative, and sometimes provocative memoir, Tim Winton explores Australia’s unique landscape, and how that singular place has shaped him and his writing.
Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco, selected by Tyehimba Jess for the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, is an aching tribute to the power and precarity of queer love.
From the celebrated author of feeld comes a formally commanding third collection, dexterously recounting the survival of a period suffused with mourning.
What is illusion—a deception, or a revelation? What is a poem—the truth, or “a diverting flash, / a mirror showing everything / but itself”?
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.
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.
Thrown in the Throat is a sex-positive incantation that retextures what it is to write a queer life amidst troubled times.
Concrete and evocative, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is a testament to persistence, even when the body is not allowed to thrive.
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.
Ask the Brindled is an intergenerational reclamation of the narratives foisted upon Indigenous and queer Hawaiians.
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.
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.”
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 Galleons, Rick Barot widens his scope, contextualizing the immigrant journey of his Filipino-American family in the larger history and aftermath of colonialism.
Spooky and spare, Gatekeeper is a striking debut collection and a suspenseful odyssey for these troubled times.
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...
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
From Arra Lynn Ross, a tender, generous, and generative extended poem centered on the experience of parenthood.
Now a Major Motion Picture from Focus Features, Starring Kevin Costner and Diane Lane
From James P. Lenfestey, a collection of poems that lends delicacy and gentle humor to durable, long-lasting 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...