From the Publisher:

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.

Praise For All Earthly Bodies:

“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

Selected by Patricia Smith for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize Series

Read an excerpt: “Interstatial” at Sonora Review

Purchase from the Publisher

“This book is a document of a particular world, real, wrenched from the poet’s life, as if written with a gun to his head or a spike through his heart. Reading it is like opening a damp newspaper wrapped around a big fish just caught, fins glistening, scales shining, one rhymed eye open and looking right at you, daring you to eat the whole thing.” —Dorianne Laux, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Only as the Day Is Long and The Book of Men

“The Dead Eat Everything, Michael Mlekoday’s furious first collection, is a cypher of old-school curses, elegy, and wordplay that snaps like gunplay. It is a revelation of sonics, as relentless and unforgiving as a Minneapolis winter … Mlekoday works lines like Hart Crane if Hart Crane listened to Rakim.” —Adrian Matejka, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Big Smoke, Map to the Stars, and Somebody Else Sold the World

 “It’s easy to forget—because of the brute beauty of the language; because of lines like ‘I have made gods / of my skinned hands’; because of the whiplash brilliance roped through these poems—that deeply, ultimately, this is a book of mourning, of sorrow, of loss: for a dad, a Baba, a city, a home. But, to boot, Michael Mlekoday’s The Dead Eat Everything is a book of magic: watch sorrows be converted to music. And music, don’t forget, makes you dance. Makes you move. Moves you.” —Ross Gay, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and author of Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, The Book of Delights, and Be Holding