All Earthly Bodies (Miller Williams Poetry Prize)

Author: Michael Mlekoday

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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.