ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

REVIEWS

“All Earthly Bodies begins ‘Even the gaze / is a kind of government.’ And that line comes back to me whenever I think of the possibilities of our work, the many places that work must go, and the hard work we must do to get it there. Michael Mlekoday is savvy at the task at hand—the poems in this book break intriguing new ground, each one rollicking with both their grasp of audience and their adroit handling of the line, the inflection, the resounding word. This is distinctly a people’s poetry, at once accessible and starkly original.”
—Patricia Smith, Series Editor

“’I am trying to let the planet / rename me.’ Across this book of many astonishments, Michael Mlekoday cultivates an intimate, generous ecopoetic language of desire and surrender, grief and praise. All Earthly Bodies delves deep into the ‘thousand worlds’ of the garden, the forest ecosystem, the urban wild, the body and its mysteries, attending to the mutual entanglements and everyday violences of earthly life with intricate attention. Mlekoday’s poems offer manifold gifts of renaming beyond boundary and binary, embodying a vital queer ecological vision for our tumultuous days. Read this book and let it transform you.”
—Margaret Ronda, author of For Hunger

“I’m thankful for this wonderful book’s hard look at power structures and symbolic white allyship, for its kaleidoscopic lens on gender and inheritance, and for its tender consideration of ecological marvels—that ‘peppery / conspiracy of soil and water / to keep the living living.’ There is a folksy kindness here meshed with fire and eloquence—a little city-granola, a little greasy, and a lot in love with the world.”
—Marcus Wicker, author of Silencer

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Series Editor’s Preface

Revolting

- - -

After

City Kid Contemplating Wilderness

I Pray for the Miracles

Pastoral

The Night the Murderous Cop Was Not Charged

- - -

Community Garden

Self-Portrait as My Friend Who Is a Narcissist and a Healer

Interstatial

Whites

As Above, So Below

- - -

Northbound Greyhound Overnight Express

Across

The Night the Owner of Our Second-Favorite Bar Put Ten Bucks into the Jukebox and Let Us Play Whatever We Wanted

Steve

Scope

- - -

In at Least a Thousand Worlds

Quantum Sister the First

Trajectory

Dreamwork

Matryoshka

- - -

Echolocution

Horizontology

Ring of Bone

Third-Wave Animism

Entomography

- - -

The First Time I Wore a Skirt in Public

Such Leavings

Quantum Sister at Twenty-Seven

The Maker, Misgendered

In the Future We’re All Luddites

- - -

Crossing to the Otherworld

Want

Quantum Sister Never the Last

A Prayer for Unbecoming

Deathwork

- - -

The Deep Hours

Extractive

Vessel

My Love, the Creek, a Fig

Salvific

Notes

Acknowledgments

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