Bøger i Made in Michigan Writers Series serien

Depending on dialect, the Anishinaabemowin word "e;weweni"e; expresses thanks, exactitude, ease, and sincerity. In addition, the word for "e;relatives"e; is "e;nindenwemaaganag"e;: those whose "e;enewewe,"e; or voices, sound familiar. In Weweni, poet Margaret Noodin brings all of these meanings to bear in a unique bilingual collection. Noodin's warm and perceptive poems were written first in the Modern Anishinaabemowin double-vowel orthography and appear translated on facing pages in English. From planetary tracking to political contrasts, stories of ghosts, and messages of trees, the poems in Weweni use many images to speak to the interconnectedness of relationships, moments of difficulty and joy, and dreams and cautions for the future. As poems move from Anishinaabemowin to English, the challenge of translation offers multiple levels of meaning-English meanings found in Anishinaabe words long as rivers and knotted like nets, English approximations that bend the dominant language in new directions, and sets of signs and ideas unable to move from one language to another. In addition to the individual dialogues played out beween Noodin's poems, the collection as a whole demonstrates a fruitful and respectful dialogue between languages and cultures. Noodin's poems will be proof to students and speakers of Anishinaabemowin that the language can be a vital space for modern expression and, for those new to the language, a lyric invitation to further exploration. Anyone interested in poetry or linguistics will enjoy this one-of-a-kind volume.

Presents a collection of short stories written by some of Michigan's most well-known fiction writers. This collection of twenty-two short stories serves as a celebration not only of the tenth anniversary of the Made in Michigan Writers Series in 2016 but also of the rich history of writing and storytelling in the region.

Beautifully-crafted prose from one of Michigan's most original voices.

A personal narrative of past and present racial violence and resistance to terror in the United States. A perfect blending of prose, poetry, and images, The Forgetting Tree is a unique and thought-provoking collection that argues for a deeper understanding of past and present so that we might imagine a more hopeful, sustainable, and loving future.

A modern-day fairy tale told in conversation between a young girl and the mermaid of Lake Michigan. This is a new tale that feels familiar. The breeze off the lake, the sand underfoot, the supreme sadness of being young and not in control - these sensations come rushing back page by page, bringing to life an ancient myth of coming of age in a troubled world.

Presents new creative nonfiction by some of Michigan's most well-known and highly acclaimed authors. A celebration of the elements, this collection is both the storm and the shelter. The essays approach Michigan at the atomic level. This is a place where weather patterns and ecology matter.

Beautifully rendered and rippling with family dysfunction, secrets, deaths, drunks, and old resentments, Shonda Buchanan's memoir is an inspiring story that explores her family's legacy of being African Americans with American Indian roots and how they dealt with not just society's ostracization but the consequences of this dual inheritance.

Gail Griffin had only been married for four months when her husband's body was found in the Manistee River, just a few yards from their cabin door. The terrain of memoir is full of stories of grief, though Grief's Country is less concerned with the biography of a love affair than with the lived phenomenon of grief itself.

A collection of poetry by award-winning Ojibwe author Lois Beardslee. Much of the book centres around Native people of the Great Lakes but it has a universal relevance to modern indigenous people worldwide.

If you thought the suburbs were boring, think again. Kelly Fordon's I Have the Answer artfully mixes the fabulist with the workaday and illuminates relationships and characters with crisp, elegant prose and dark wit. The stories in Fordon's latest collection are disquieting, humorous, and thought-provoking.

An ecopoet whose writing shows her advocacy for natural resources, in this collection Alison Swan calls the reader to witness, appreciate, and sustain this world before it becomes too late. These poems were written out of an impulse to track down wisdom in the open air, outside of the noisy world of cars and commerce.

In a thrilling interconnected narrative, You're in the Wrong Place presents characters reaching for transcendence from a place they cannot escape. In turns elegiac and harrowing, You're in the Wrong Place blends lyric intensity with philosophical eroticism to create a singular, powerful vision of contemporary American life.

In How Other People Make Love, Thisbe Nissen chronicles the lives and choices of people questioning the heteronormative institution of marriage. Not best-served by established conventions and conventional mores, these people-young, old, gay, straight, Midwestern, coastal-are finding their own paths in learning who they are and how they want to love and be loved, even when those paths must be blazed through the unknown. Concerning husbands and wives, lovers and leavers, Nissen's stories explore our search for connection and all the ways we undercut it, unwittingly and intentionally, when we do find it. How do we hold ourselves together-to function, work, and survive-while endlessly yearning to be undone, unraveled, and laid bare, however untenable and excruciating? How Other People Make Love contains nine stories. "e;Win's Girl"e; features a single woman who works at an Iowa slaughterhouse and uses the insurance money from a car accident to update the electric system in her dead parents' old house, only to be unwittingly embroiled with a shady electrician who ultimately forces her to stand up for herself. In "e;Home Is Where the Heart Gives Out and We Arouse the Grass,"e; a young woman flees after cheating on her husband and winds up at a Nebraska roadside motel populated by participants in a regional dog show who help her decide what to do next. In "e;Unity Brought Them Together,"e; a young man heads to his favorite New York coffee shop intending to finish the Christmas cards his vacationing fiance insists on sending, but winds up meeting another displaced young Midwestern man there and going home with him instead. All these stories explore the question, "e;how do we love?"e; as well as the answers we find, discard, follow, banish, and cling to in all our humanness and desperation. How Other People Make Love asserts that there aren't right and wrong ways to love; there are only our very complicated and contradictory human hearts, minds, bodies, and desires-all searching for something, whether we know what that is or not. These are stories for anyone who has ever loved or been loved.

Mortality, With Friends is a collection of lyrical essays from Fleda Brown, a writer and caretaker, of her father and sometimes her husband, who lives with the nagging uneasiness that her cancer could return. Memoir in feel, the book muses on the nature of art, of sculpture, of the loss of bees and trees, the end of marriages, and among other things, the loss of hearing and of life itself. Containing twenty-two essays, Mortality, With Friends follows the cascade of loss with the author's imminent joy in opening a path to track her own growing awareness and wisdom. In "e;Donna,"e; Brown examines a childhood friendship and questions the roles we need to play in each other's lives to shape who we might become. In "e;Native Bees,"e; Brown expertly weaves together the threads of a difficult family tradition intended to incite happiness with the harsh reality of current events. In "e;Fingernails, Toenails,"e; she marvels at the attention and suffering that accompanies caring for our aging bodies. In "e;Mortality, with Friends,"e; Brown dives into the practical and stupefying response to her own cancer and survival. In "e;2019: Becoming Mrs. Ramsay,"e; she remembers the ghosts of her family and the strident image of herself, positioned in front of her Northern Michigan cottage. Comparable to Lia Purpura's essays in their density and poetics, Brown's intent is to look closely, to stay with the moment and the image. Readers with a fondness for memoir and appreciation for art will be dazzled by the beauty of this collection.

The poems in Gun/Shy deal with the emotional weight of making do. Tinged with both the regrets and wisdom of aging, Jim Daniels's poems measure the wages of love in a changing world with its vanishing currency. He explores the effects of family work-putting children to bed, leading parents to their final resting places-and what is lost and gained in those exertions. Childhood and adolescence are examined, through both looking back on his own childhood and on that of his children. While his personal death count rises, Daniels reflects on his own mortality. He finds solace in small miracles-his mother stretching the budget to feed five children with "e;hamburger surprise"e; and potato skins, his children collecting stones and crabapples as if they were gold coins. Daniels, as he always has, carries the anchor of Detroit with him, the weight both a comfort and a burden. He explores race, white privilege, and factory work. Eight Mile Road, a fraught border, pulses with division, and the echoes of music, singing through Detroit's soiled but solid heart, resonate in these poems. His first long poem in many years, "e;Gun/Shy,"e; centers the book. Through the personas of several characters, Daniels dives into America's gun culture and the violent gulf between the fearful and the feared. Throughout, he seeks connection in likely and unlikely places: a river rising after spring rain and searchlights crossing the night sky. Comets and cloudy skies. Cement ponds and the Garden of Eden. Adolescence and death. Wounds physical and psychic. Disguises and more disguises. These are the myths we memorize to help us sleep at night, those that keep us awake and trembling. Daniels's accessible language, subtlety, and deftness make this collection one that belongs on every poetry reader's shelf.