All Earthly Bodies by Michael Mlekoday, finalist for the 2022 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, is now available.
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.
Patricia Smith, judge and editor of the Miller Williams Poetry Series, writes in the introduction, “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.”
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.
Every year, the University of Arkansas Press accepts submissions for the Miller Williams Poetry Series and from the books selected awards the $5,000 Miller Williams Poetry Prize in the following summer. For almost a quarter century the press has made this series the cornerstone of its work as a publisher of some of the country’s best new poetry. The series and prize are named for and operated to honor the cofounder and longtime director of the press, Miller Williams.