“This may be the best thing I’ve read all year. I have the feeling that I immediately want to start reading it again. One, because I loved the experience of reading it, and two, because I’m not done thinking about it or understanding it. There is so much to learn and parse and meditate on.”

—SUZANNE on Letters from Max by Sarah Ruhl & Max Ritvo

“I tear up just thinking how much more blessed this world will be with the arrival of such a voice. Never stop singing your beautiful song, Jake—because we’ll never stop listening.”

—PARIS on Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers by Jake Skeets

“Without question the most powerful account of climate change I’ve yet read, paying equal attention to human and nonhuman lives, race and class, geography and economics, emotion and reason.”

—JED on Rising by Elizabeth Rush

“I will hold this book close for many years to come—it reminded me of the Mary Oliver quote: ‘Instructions for a life—Pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.’ This book is a meditation on both living and dying, on holding people close and letting them go. Sincerely a book like no other—I was both deeply touched and deeply inspired.”

—LOUISE on Late Migrations by Margaret Renkl

“In this brave memoir, Darrel McLeod explores the racism and other forms of judgement that tried to push him down. But he also celebrates his Cree culture and the family love that endured all hardship. This is a powerful read, and I could not put it down. Reading about his life, I cried, I raged, and I grew still to listen. As with all the best memoirs, this book allowed me to imagine what it might have been like to be in his shoes.“

—DEBBIE on Mamaskatch by Darrel J. McLeod

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Ada Limón is my favorite living poet. I love her work because she is realistic without being too pessimistic, an attitude much needed in these trying times. There’s always room for hope in her poems.”

—CAROLINE on The Carrying by Ada Limón

“A fantastic book. I cannot praise it enough. It is a vitally important read for humanity as we see ourselves, how we see the world, our relation to it and how we need each other. While she speaks of greed that chokes the world, she speaks too of positiveness and what we can do to heal the earth and ourselves.”

—YASMIN on Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

“I’m so excited to be publishing my collection of illustrated nature essays next year! It’s my love letter to this planet and all the wild and wondrous plants and animals that I’ve fallen in love with over the years. It’s also a love letter to my immigrant parents. They helped me realize that there was a place for me in the outdoors when most books, TV shows, and movies didn’t show me that.”

World of Wonders, the first work of nonfiction by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, will be published by Milkweed in Fall 2020.

“I wrote the first poem for the collection in 2014 and the last poem in 2017—a quick span from my standpoint as a usually slow writer. The Galleons is engaged in the work of recovery in regards to erased histories and speaks to the principle that has informed much of my work as a poet—the work of earnest inclusivity. This work has led to an enlarging of what the political means to me—it is rooted in the daily, the intimate, and most importantly, in the apprehension of justice.”

The Galleons, the fourth collection of poems by Rick Barrot, will be published by Milkweed in Winter 2020.

“I have been working on this novel for about four and a half years. I wanted to write a story where social media was made into a character that could be identified and then demolished. I wanted to explore how the internet has influenced our deepest subconscious desires, even those who consider themselves set apart from it, who are living on the edges of capitalist society, in nature or otherwise.”

The Shame, the first novel by Makenna Goodman, will be published by Milkweed in Fall 2020.

“My work asks ‘What does it mean to be a person of native Mexican ancestry writing in English and Spanish, where even my mother tongue is the product of colonization? How do we talk about queerness in a language that suppressed its existence for so long?’ This is my way of taking a history that was forced upon us and making it ours.”

Thrown in the Throat, the debut collection of poems by Benjamin Garcia, will be published by Milkweed in Fall 2020.

“I wrote the first drafts of A Song from Faraway twenty years ago to understand how family identity could be transformed not only by borders and wars but also by various trypes of artistic expression. Over the course of many rewrites, the novel’s family took shape, with the lives of its members spanning a hundred and fifty years. Their paths often barely crossed and yet deeply affected each other, so that each new storyline joined the previous to create a larger narrative about the ways that artistic creations can transmit memory and history or catalyze change.”

A Song from Faraway, the fourth novel by Deni Ellis Béchard, will be published by Milkweed in Spring 2020.