An astonishing, vital book about Antarctica, climate change, and motherhood from the author of Rising, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.
Reading Lists
30 Lists
- An imaginative anthology of climate fiction from emerging new voices, curated by the editors of Grist Magazine.
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A vibrant collection of personal and lyric essays in conversation with archival objects of Black history and memory.
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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.
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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.
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As the Amazon burns, Fábio Zuker shares stories of resistance, self-determination, and kinship with the land.
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Rising weaves the firsthand accounts of those who are living through sea level rise today with eyewitness reporting from our shoreline’s disappearing places.
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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.
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In a patchwork quilt of personal and reported essays, Margaret Renkl’s columns offer a dose of natural beauty, human decency, and persistent hope from her home in Nashville.
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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 food…
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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.
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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 lasting…
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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.
- From the acclaimed authors of A Year in the Wilderness, an extraordinary account of a 12,000-mile, human-powered journey across the continent
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A multicultural anthology about the enduring importance and shifting associations of the hearth in our world.
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At the very time we need them most, scientists and the idea of objective knowledge are being bombarded by a well-funded, three-part war on science. This provocative book investigates why and how, and offers compelling solutions to bring us to our…
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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…
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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…
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To Make Room for the Sea reckons with the notion that nothing in this world is permanent.
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From the Adirondack Mountains to Kerala, India, to Curitiba, Brazil, this book offers clear-eyed and profoundly compelling portraits of places where resourceful people have confronted modern problems with inventive solutions, and thrived in the…
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A haunting collection that inhabits a disquieting future where fear is the governing body, “the organ and the tissue / and the cell, the membrane and the organelle.”
- Winner of the 2023 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, this engrossing debut interrogates history, identity, and the power of poetry to elucidate both.
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Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Jackson Holbert’s Winter Stranger is a solemn record of addiction and the divided affections we hold for the landscapes that shape us.
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Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Ryann Stevenson’s Human Resources is a sobering and perceptive portrait of technology’s impact on connection and power.
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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.
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Winner of the 2019 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, The Clearing navigates the ever-shifting poles of violence and vulnerability with rich imagination and a singular incisiveness.
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This winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize is an elegant debut that searches widely to ask what it means to exist in a state of loss.
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The winner of the inaugural Max Ritvo Poetry Prize is an assured debut collection about grace—the places we search for it, and the disjunction between what we seek and where we arrive.
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Radiant with a tenderness that is only achieved through close attention, these poems offer witnessing and formalistic exploration as well as a unique cosmology that is made ever more expansive by blurred lines between the instructional and the…
- An excavatory collection of poems tracing the connections between Jewish transfemininity, queer desire, and cultural histories.
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I Love Information, selected by Brian Teare as a winner of the National Poetry Series, is a vigorous examination of knowledge, belief, and which begets which.
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Ask the Brindled is an intergenerational reclamation of the narratives foisted upon Indigenous and queer Hawaiians.
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Selected by Sally Keith as a winner of the National Poetry Series, this debut collection is a ruminative catalogue of overgrowth and the places that haunt us.
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Thrown in the Throat is a sex-positive incantation that retextures what it is to write a queer life amidst troubled times.
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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.
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This National Poetry Series winner defiantly makes space for bodies that have been historically denied their own vocabulary. These poems stake a claim on the language available to speak about trans experience.
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Uncanny, heartbreaking, and often surreal, this National Poetry Series winner is an unforgettable elegy for the people and places that have been lost to opioids in rural Appalachia.
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Mothers masquerading as witches and sepulchral bellhops who reveal themselves to be fathers: in these poems, nothing is as it seems. Shot through with mournfulness, gorgeously spangled in its language, this National Poetry Series winner illuminates…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco, selected by Tyehimba Jess for the Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, is an aching tribute to the power and precarity of queer love.
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Selected by Jos Charles as the winner of the 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.
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Concrete and evocative, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is a testament to persistence, even when the body is not allowed to thrive.
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Spooky and spare, Gatekeeper is a striking debut collection and a suspenseful odyssey for these troubled times.
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Claire Wahmanholm maps an alien but unnervingly familiar world as it accelerates into cataclysm.
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Inspired by the mysterious and intense relationship of the Trakl siblings, Solve for Desire is a keening exploration of desire between brother and sister, poet and subject, the living and the dead.
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Tula: a ruined Toltec capital; a Russian city known for its accordions; Tagalog for “poem.” Inspired by the experiences of the second-generation immigrant who does not fully acquire the language of his parents, the winner of the 2016 Lindquist &…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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 real and…
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Winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, this collection of poems seeks answers about how to live meaningfully in a world saturated by late capitalism.
“The question isn’t / what exists,” writes Sarah V. Schweig in her engrossing and prize-winning…
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Yalie Saweda Kamara’s Besaydoo is an elegantly wrought love song to home—as place, as people, as body, and as language. Yalie Saweda Kamara writes for a new America, where praise is plentiful and Black lives flourish.
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Telescopes aim to observe the light of the cosmos, but Christopher Brean Murray turns his powerful lens toward the strange darkness of human existence in Black Observatory.
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Chosen by Randall Mann as a winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, Rise and Float depicts the journey of a poet working—remarkably, miraculously—to make our most profound, private wounds visible on the page.
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Environmental collapse. The betrayals and alliances of the animal world. The celebrities in our feeds, the stories we tell ourselves.
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This winner of the Jake Adam York Prize creates an unforgettable portrait of loss full of urgency and heartache and philosophical daring.
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Selected by Victoria Chang, this winner of the Jake Adam York Prize is a deeply personal examination of violent masculinity, driven by a yearning for more compassionate ways of being.
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This Jake Adam York Prize winner is a vivid portrait of the artist as a young woman. At every step, these poems seduce with history, folklore, and sensory detail.
- Winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, a tender, yearning collection of poems that pieces together identity with the different shapes absence can take.
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The characters of these stories are animated by forces at once passionate and perplexing. Fiercely funny and entirely original, this collection takes readers from the United States to Israel and back again to examine the mystifying reaches of our own…
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A stirring novel tuned to the clash between soul music’s vision of our essential responsibility to each other and a world that breaks us down and tears us apart.
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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.
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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.
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Brothers C and Sam left home after their father’s violent death. But upon their return to the Easter house—looming over the residents of Ontarion, Iowa—they create a lucrative business: The Associate, a group of men who perform services for a fee…
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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 the…
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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 story of…
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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.
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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…
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Twin brothers Amed and Aziz live in the peaceful shade of their family’s orange grove. But when a bomb kills the boys’ grandparents, blood will repay blood—and the war that plagues their country changes their lives forever.
