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.
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.
“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
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.
Adopted at: University of Virginia
Course: ENCW 2300 Poetry Writing
Course Description: An introduction to the craft of writing poetry, with relevant readings in the genre.
Professor: Makshya Tolbert
Term: Spring 2023
