by Michael Mlekoday (Author)
Finalist, 2022 Miller Williams Poetry Prize
From cities and cross-country bus rides to swamps and fern forests, Michael Mlekoday's All Earthly Bodies celebrates the ungentrifiable, ungovernable wildness of life. This is anarchist ecology, nonbinary environmentalism, an earthbound theology against empire in all its forms. These poems ask how our lives and language, our prayers and politics, might evolve if we really listened to the world and its more-than-human songs.
"Sometimes I wish I could / peel myself from myself / without discarding the shell," Mlekoday writes. Through a kind of lyric dreamwork, Mlekoday sounds the depths--of ancestry and identity, race and gender, earth and self--to track the unbecoming and re-membering of the body.
Author Biography
Michael Mlekoday lives in the Putah Creek watershed of California, where they serve as poetry editor of Ruminate and teach classes on hip-hop, gothic literature, and wilderness poetics. They have won the National Poetry Slam and served as cofounding editor of Button Poetry. Their first book, The Dead Eat Everything, won the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize.