All Earthly Bodies

by Michael Mlekoday

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.

Genres: Poetry

116 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2022

Reviews

[Kavanaugh Kohls · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of these poems are excellent- reminiscent of the work of Italo Calvino.

Others read like overly embellished tweets from that one guy you keep forgetting to unfollow.

[Gabriel Noel · Rating 5 out of 5]

ARC given by Edelweiss+ for Honest Review

4.5 stars rounded up

A beautiful and lyrical collection of poetry about the relationship of our bodies with the earth, land, and the passage of time. Themes on systemic racism, death, and gender elevate the collection with nuanced ideas that leave room for great discussions.

My favorite poems are: "City Kid Contemplating Wilderness", "Trajectory", "Horizontology", and "In The Future We're All Luddites."