Swim Lessons by Maud Lavin

Release date: September 2, 2025

In this collection of poetry and personal essay, Maud Lavin crafts a generous vision of Lake Michigan, Chicago, pacifist Jewish heritage, climate science, sensuality, love, and ethics—all experienced through the senses of an ever-changing body. This book asks the question: what does it mean to live in one body for an entire lifetime? In narrative verse and image-rich realism, Lavin lifts up the self as one part of a collective, called to share the plant’s water and protect it—for all our lives.

A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Maud Lavin has published in Reckon Review, Copihue Poetry, BRIDGE, Roi Fainéant, The Nation, Harper's Bazaar, Slate, and other venues. One of her books, Cut With the Kitchen Knife (Yale University Press), was named a New York Times Notable Book. Her other books include Clean New World and Push Comes to Shove, both MIT Press, and three anthologies. Her writing has appeared in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Dutch, Finnish, and Spanish, as well as English. Recently, Cowboy Jamboree Press published her Silences, Ohio, and From Beyond Press her eco-novel Mermaids and Lazy Activists. She is a 4-H alumna and a Guggenheim Fellow.