About Moving The Bones:

A vulnerable and honest collection of poems exploring lineage, love, and the pandemic, from one of the most acclaimed poets of his generation.

“You are told to believe in one paradise / and then there is the paradise you come to know,” begins Rick Barot. What follows is an account of the rich and thorny valley between those poles. Moving the Bones dwells in liminal spaces—of love and memory, the pandemic’s singular domesticity, a serene cemetery of ancestral plots, dawn. In precise and tender verse, Barot captures the particularities of being in the middle of one’s life, reflecting on the joys and sorrows of the past and confronting the inevitabilities that lie ahead.

For Barot, this presence of mind is an art of being lost in thought. “My mind has a slow metabolism, it is slow / to understand what anything means,” he confides, “but understands that if you look at something / long enough, it will have something / to say to you.” Appreciating a Rembrandt, standing in a Goodwill, watching a boy with a flower behind his ear—we encounter ephemeral murmurs of meaning everywhere, but only by slowing down, listening. If we take time to notice the enduring insights of daily moments, if we praise cherry blossoms, lungs, and crying, we might find it easier to bear the loss of a loved one, the sting of solitude, the body’s decline.

By laying bare his own experiences, Barot brings us close enough to witness the lyrical work of consciousness. Patient and attentive, this collection illuminates the everyday and invites us to find pleasure in doing the same, at every stage of life.

About Rick Barot:

Rick Barot's most recent book of poems is Moving the Bones, published by Milkweed Editions in 2024.  His previous collection, The Galleons, was longlisted for the National Book Award.  His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The New Republic, The Adroit Journal, and The New Yorker.  He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Stanford University.  He lives in Tacoma, Washington and directs The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University. 

About The End of Childhood:

A tender and provocative collection of poems interrogating the troubles and wonders of both childhood and parenthood against the backdrop of global violence.

From accomplished poet Wayne Miller comes a collection examining how an individual’s story both hues to and defies larger socio-political narratives and the sweep of history. A cubist making World War I camouflage, a forlorn panel on the ethics of violence in literature, an obsessive litany of “late capitalist” activities, a military drone pilot driving home after work—here, the awkward, the sweet, and the disturbing often merge. And underlying it all is Miller’s own domestic life with two children, who highlight the hopeful and ingenious aspects of childhood, which is “not // as I had thought / the thicket of light back at the entrance // but the wind still blowing / invisibly toward me / through it.”

The End of Childhood, Miller’s sixth collection of poems, is his most intimate, juxtaposing his own fraught youth with that of his children amid insurrection and pandemic, vacation and vocation, art and war. This piercing book spares nothing as it searches for a measure of personal benevolence and truth in today’s turbulent, brutalizing world—which it confronts through a singularly candid and lyrical voice.

About Wayne Miller:

Wayne Miller is the author of six poetry collections: The End of Childhood (2025), We the Jury (2021), Post- (2016), The City, Our City (2011), The Book of Props (2009), and Only the Senses Sleep (2006). His awards include the UNT Rilke Prize, two Colorado Book Awards, a Pushcart Prize, an NEA Translation Fellowship, six awards from the Poetry Society of America, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, and a Fulbright Distinguished Scholarship to the Seamus Heaney Centre in Northern Ireland. He has co-translated two books from Albanian into English—most recently Moikom Zeqo’s Zodiac (2015), shortlisted for the PEN Center USA Award in Translation—and has co-edited three books, most recently Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century (2016). He lives in Denver, where he co-directs the Unsung Masters Series, teaches at the University of Colorado Denver, and edits Copper Nickel.