Milkweed Editions

From one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers, an urgent and essential collection of poems illuminating the visionary presence of Palestinians.

Fady Joudah’s powerful sixth collection of poems opens with, “I am unfinished business,” articulating the ongoing pathos of the Palestinian people. A rendering of Joudah’s survivance, [...] speaks to Palestine’s daily and historic erasure and insists on presence inside and outside the ancestral land.

Responding to the unspeakable in real time, Joudah offers multiple ways of seeing the world through a Palestinian lens—a world filled with ordinary desires, no matter how grand or tragic the details may be—and asks their reader to be changed by them. The sequences are meditations on a the past returns as the future is foretold. But “Repetition won’t guarantee wisdom,” Joudah writes, demanding that we resuscitate language “before [our] wisdom is an echo.” These poems of urgency and care sing powerfully through a combination of intimate clarity and great dilations of scale, sending the reader on heartrending spins through echelons of time. […] is a wonder. Joudah reminds us “Wonder belongs to all.”

Aster of Ceremonies asks what rites we need now and how poetry, astir in the asters, can help them along. What is the relationship between fleeing and feeling? How can the voices of those who came before—and the stutters that leaven those voices—carry into our present moment, mingling with our own? When Ellis writes, "Bring me the stolen will / Bring me the stolen well," his voice is a conduit, his "me" is many. Through the grateful invocations of ancestors, Hannah, Mariah, Kit, Jan, and others, and their songs, he rewrites history, creating a world that blooms backward, reimagining what it means for Black and disabled people to have taken, and to continue to take, their freedom.

A polyphonic new entry in Multiverse—a literary series written and curated by the neurodivergent—JJJJJerome Ellis's Aster of Ceremonies beautifully extends the vision of his debut book and album, The Clearing, a "lyrical celebration of and inquiry into the intersections of blackness, music, and disabled speech" (Claudia Rankine).

JJJJJerome Ellis is the author of Aster of Ceremonies. He is an animal, stutterer, and artist. He is also the author and composer of The Clearing, an audio-textual project that investigates how stuttering, blackness, and music can be practices of refusal against hegemonic governance of time, speech, and encounter. His work has been presented by the Lincoln Center, the Poetry Project, MASS MoCA, REDCAT, Arraymusic, and the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, among others. He lives in Tidewater, Virginia, where he was raised by Jamaican and Grenadian immigrants.

"As a leading researcher in the field of biology, Robin Wall Kimmerer understands the delicate state of our world. But as an active member of the Potawatomi nation, she senses and relates to the world through a way of knowing far older than any science. In Braiding Sweetgrass, she intertwines these two modes of awareness — the analytic and the emotional, the scientific and the cultural—to ultimately reveal a path toward healing the rift that grows between people and nature. The woven essays that construct this book bring people back into conversation with all that is green and growing; a universe that never stopped speaking to us, even when we forgot how to listen"

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants and Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. She lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.