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"I give daily thanks for Robin Wall Kimmerer for being a font of endless knowledge, both mental and spiritual." -RICHARD POWERS, NEW YORK TIMES

"A groundbreaking work about race and the American landscape. Thoughtful, sincere, wise, and beautiful."-Helen Macdonald

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on "e;a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise"e; (Elizabeth Gilbert). Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings-asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass-offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

Chris Dombrowski was playing a numbers game: two passionspoetry and fly-fishing; two children, one of them in utero; and an income hovering perilously close to zero. Enter, at this particularly challenging moment, a miraculous email: cant go, its all paid for, just book a flight to Miami.Thus began a journey that would lead to the Bahamas and to David Pinder, a legendary bonefishing guide. Bonefish are prized for their elusiveness and their tenacity. And no one was better at hunting them than Pinder, a Bahamian whose accuracy and patience were virtuosic. He knows what the fish think, said one fisherman, before they think it.By the time Dombrowski meets Pinder, however, he has been abandoned by the industry he helped build. With cataracts from a lifetime of staring at the water and a tiny severance package after forty years of service, he watches as the world of his beloved bonefish is degraded by tourists he himself did so much to attract. But as Pinders stories unfold, Dombrowski discovers a profound integrity and wisdom in the guides life.

John James Audubon is renowned for his masterpiece of natural history and art, The Birds of America, the first nearly comprehensive survey of the continents birdlife. And yet few people understand, and many assume incorrectly, what sort of man he was. How did the illegitimate son of a French sea captain living in Haiti, who lied both about his parentage and his training, rise to become one of the greatest natural historians ever and the greatest name in ornithology? In Under a Wild Sky this Pulitzer Prize finalist, William Souder reveals that Audubon did not only compose the most famous depictions of birds the world has ever seen, he also composed a brilliant mythology of self. In this dazzling work of biography, Souder charts the life of a driven man who, despite all odds, became the historical figure we know today.

NATIONAL BESTSELLERThe #1 bestselling and beloved poetry anthology, now in paperback!“Whoever you are, you will find yourself and your own world in the expansiveness of this collection.” –Margaret Renkl, New York Times“A lovely book to take with you to read at the end of your next hike.” –Los Angeles TimesPublished association with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, a singular collection of poems reflecting on our relationship to the natural world by fifty of our most celebrated contemporary writers.  In recent years, our poetic landscape has evolved in profound and exciting ways. So has our planet. Edited and introduced by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limón, this book challenges what we think we know about “nature poetry,” illuminating the myriad ways our landscapes—both literal and literary—are changing.You Are Here features fifty previously unpublished poems from some of the nation’s most accomplished poets, including Joy Harjo, Diane Seuss, Rigoberto González, Jericho Brown, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Paul Tran, and more. Each poem engages with its author’s local landscape—be it the breathtaking variety of flora in a national park, or a lone tree flowering persistently by a bus stop—offering an intimate model of how we relate to the world around us and a beautifully diverse range of voices from across the United States.Joyful and provocative, wondrous and urgent, this singular collection of poems offers a lyrical reimagining of what “nature” and “poetry” are today, inviting readers to experience both anew.

A visionary collection of poetry advocating for the excited, the rebellious, and the neuroqueer. In this momentous debut, Sid Ghosh invites the reader “to be so free that it scares you.” Leveraging gem-like koans, technicolor wordplay, and earth-shaking wit, he creates startling new worlds in only a handful of words. As a nonspeaking autistic writer with Down syndrome who must navigate immense sensorimotor complexity, his short poems are both muscular and agile, displaying a dexterity replete with vertiginous grace: “Spinning I harness / poetry of the Earth. // The Sufi dances / in me to dare me // to scare your loud / soul to ensnare // my fearful mind to / bare some misery / to bear some truth.”Ghosh writes beyond his years and from a perspective steeped in queer and fractaled sensibilities. As one who is “simply privy to a new road,” he renders neurodiverse thought patterns as truly divine. The poems that result bristle with wisdom, divergence, and the “generosity of deep rivers.” Unprecedented in its genius and composition, this collection of poems is sure to leave readers wide-eyed and breathless.

A propulsive, layered examination of the conflict between the course of nature and human legacies of resistance and control.Floods, geoengineering, climate crisis. Her first year in Margaretville, New York, Jennifer Kabat wakes to a rain-bloated stream and three-foot waves in her basement.This is far from the first—and hardly the worst—natural disaster to devastate her town. As Kabat dives deeper into the region’s fraught environmental history, she discovers it was more than once the site of Cold War weather experimentation. She traces connections between noctilucent clouds, man-made precipitation, and the 1950 Rainmaker’s Flood—finding unlikely characters along the way, including Kurt Vonnegut’s brother, Bernard, a scientist at General Electric. And all the while she searches for ways to cope with the grief of her environmentalist father’s recent passing. “Because I need the water to speak to me too,” she writes.Curious and experimental, Nightshining uses place as the palimpsest of history, digging into questions of personal responsibility and planetary change. With “characteristically lyrical incision” (Marko Gluhaich), Kabat circles back to her own life experience and the essence of being human—the cosmos thrumming in our bodies, connecting readers to the land around us and time before us.

From celebrated poet and ecologist Katherine Larson, an elegant collection of lyric essays that embraces fractures, contradictions, and the interconnectedness of life on Earth. Raising two children, isolated by the pandemic, and increasingly aware of the disappearance of species and entire ways of being, Katherine Larson finds herself in need of an antidote for despair. “Even in this age of grief and extinction,” she writes, “I knew that I didn’t want numbness.”This is when Larson encounters kintsugi—the art of repairing broken pottery with gold-dusted lacquer. Wedding of the Foxes borrows from this ancient practice to create a new interpretative framework, one that seeks beauty in both breakage and unexpected connections. Here, Larson juxtaposes the elaborate courtship dance of sandhill cranes with scientific reports on diminishing avian populations to shed light on the urgency of climate crisis. She braids the wisdoms of a wonderfully various range of forebears and predecessors—Gaston Bachelard, Tawada Yōko, Francis Ponge—who share her dream of a liberated consciousness. She weaves Susan Sontag’s examinations of cinematic disaster with the legacy of Godzilla to highlight nature as both savior and destroyer. Each of these disparate parts come together to highlight the beauty in “what falls through the cracks and blurs into other moments.”Brimming with the dazzling yet fragile relationships we share with each other and with other species, these lush microcosms invite us to embrace resilience and mindfulness—and the illuminating truth of our connections.

From “one of America’s great living writers” (Jonathan Safran Foer), a prescient, high-stakes novel dissecting the ways we tell stories—privately and publicly—amid radical social change.At his desk one day, prominent Washington journalist Adam Zweig receives a text message. “Btw want to give you a heads-up abt some breaking news,” it reads. “call soonest.” These are the early rumblings of an eventual media storm initiated by fellow journalist Valerie Iovine, who has gone public with her account of sexual harassment at the hands of esteemed editor and liberal icon Max Lieberthol. Twenty years have passed since the incident, and though Adam wasn’t directly involved, he quickly finds himself implicated, entangled, and ultimately questioning his moral, personal, and professional standing.For Adam has a history with Valerie: as former colleagues, their workplace collaboration gradually tipped into flirtation, and then into mutual passion. Or so he thought. Confronted by the actions of his former boss and a growing awareness of rampant sexism in his industry, Adam, who had always thought of himself as progressive, is forced to cast a critical light on his own assumptions and behaviors over the years. What once seemed incidental becomes sinister; what then seemed like a casual encounter in truth played a part in derailing a young woman’s promising career.Fascinating, tense, and scrutinous, Big Swinging is a close-quarters account of our changing media landscape, and what happens when one finds oneself on the wrong side of an awakening.

From award-winning poet Chris Santiago, a far-reaching collection of erasures and original poems examining the long shadow of American militarism and imperialism.Stemming in part from a disturbingly mundane military document of the same name, Small Wars Manual is a how-to for imperialism that critically dismantles itself with each passing line, “a pidgin // containing elements // of animus and // insubordination.” In its wake, the very boundaries of oppression and resistance, art and justice, and power and truth are exploded.Highly conceptual yet gut-wrenching, this meticulous and visionary masterpiece of erasure poetry and other forms sinks into the cold mechanics of American warfare in the Philippines and Vietnam to reveal a brutal rhetoric. In more autobiographical sections, Chris Santiago’s own Filipino immigrant background reveals hard-lived experiences, where “stars can guide // either bayonets // or refugees” and “even small wars waged // on the living room floor” cause trepidation and harm.This righteous collection redeems the vulnerable from the aggressors—empire, army, their systems and tools—and transforms everything in the process. In the hands of Santiago, the deconstructive becomes the eviscerating, condemning all wars that upend countries and mark generations. Here are shining poems that make shelter of chaos, by one of the most skillful and intrepid poets writing today.

A brilliant and lithe collection of poems making space for the resolve and hope of motherhood amid consumerist dreams and nightmares.Consumerism—its privations and raptures—seep into all aspects of contemporary life. “Who knows me / as the search bar does, which holds / sacred its grasp of me / as a creature of habit?” probes Rosalie Moffett, reckoning with algorithms, with marketing and capital. But Making a Living isn’t just about the trappings of materialism—it’s also about the fraught trials of trying to bring forth life in a double-dealing America where all sources are suspect.Shrewdly balancing the likes of Scrooge McDuck and HGTV, ancient Roman haruspicy and the latest pregnancy technologies, this collection arcs ultimately toward reinhabiting the present, refusing to look away—on seeing as a method of prayer and a power against capitalism’s threats to love, motherhood, reverence, and nature. Militant and profane, gentle and generous, full of desire and cunning, Moffett’s poetry is a singular entry in our conversations around enduring modern life and daring to make new life in the process.

A tender and provocative collection of poems interrogating the troubles and wonders of childhood and parentage against the backdrop of global violence.From the accomplished and tenacious 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 capitalism” routines, a military drone pilot driving home—here, the awkward, the sweet, and the disturbing often merge. And underlaying it all is Miller’s own domestic life and two children, who highlight the hopeful and ingenious aspects of childhood, which endures “not // as I had thought / the thicket of light back at the entrance // but the wind still blowing / invisibly toward me / through it.” Wayne Miller’s sixth collection of poems is his most intimate, juxtaposing his fraught youth with his children's cautiously safer one, against insurrection and pandemic, vacation and vocation, art and war. This piercing book spares nothing and no one in searching out a measure of personal truth and benevolence in today’s turbulent, brutalizing world, confronted by a singularly candid and lyrical voice.

For readers of Robert Macfarlane, Rebecca Solnit, and Robert Moor, a multidimensional exploration of ecology, revolution, and homecoming."How are the shapes we follow in life also shaping us?"Growing up in northern California, in a family of high-achieving athletes, Nicholas Triolo was imbued with a particularly acute form of our intensely goal-oriented culture. "Do the reps," he internalized. "Commit to the work. Grind for your dreams." Shortly after graduating from college, he embarked on a solo circumnavigation of the globe. And then after returning to the States, he threw himself into ultrarunning, all to combat a deepening discontent. While traveling around the world, it was in Kathmandu that Triolo first encountered kora, a form of moving prayer in which pilgrims walk in circles around a sacred site or object--a kind of "ritualized remembering" birthed by place. Unable to shake this initial encounter with circumambulation, he sets out here on three such extended walks. First, he completes the sacred thirty-two-mile revolution around Tibet's Mount Kailash, in search of a cultural counter to Western linearity. Then, following his mother's diagnosis with breast cancer, he returns home to California and takes part in an annual circuit of Mount Tamalpais, tracing a route made famous by Beat poets Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Allen Ginsberg. And then finally, he meets up with a quirky hydrogeologist in Butte, Montana, and joins his walk around the Berkeley Pit Complex, the largest Superfund site in the country. At once uncommonly humble and thrillingly transcendent, blurring the boundaries of inner and outer landscapes, The Way Around models what it means to experience a true revolution of heart and home--for the flourishing of all.

One woman’s cross-country journey to explore the hold family history has on our lives, and the power of new stories to shape what lies ahead.In her mid-thirties, happily single if also tied closely to a family that has long thought of her as their historian, Karen Babine hitches up her Scamp and sets out with her two unenthusiastic cats, Galway and Maeve, on a journey from her home in Minnesota to Nova Scotia, to find the place where her French-Acadian ancestors settled in North America some four centuries ago.As the miles roll by, she wonders: “Why do we carry this need to belong to an established history? What happens when that can’t—or shouldn’t—happen?” The road reveals more questions than answers about history, identity, and belonging, about the responsibilities of stories and silence, about where she is in life and what it means to be driven by both a strong sense of kinship and attachment to home on one hand, and a deep desire for independence on the other. Capturing the joy, freedom, and powerful pull of the open road, The Allure of Elsewhere is about the stories we’re told, the stories we tell, and the way those stories make us who we are, often in surprising ways. Intimate, curious, and candid, written with wry wit and warmth, this is a courageous and inspiring memoir.

"On being a shepherdess in the Green Mountains of Vermont"--

A definitive collection of Henry David Thoreau's major essays, annotated and introduced by Lewis Hyde.Diverging from the long-standing custom of separating Thoreau's politics from his interest in nature, renowned author Lewis Hyde brings together essays that highlight the ways in which these two strands of thought were intertwined. Here, natural history begins not with fish and birds, but with a dismissal of the political world, and condemnation of slavery concludes with a meditation on the water lilies blooming on the Concord River.This definitive edition includes Thoreau's most famous essays, "Civil Disobedience" and "Walking," along with lesser-known masterpieces such as "Wild Apples," "The Last Days of John Brown," and an account of Thoreau's 1846 journey into the Maine wilderness to climb Mount Katahdin--an essay that ends on a unique note of sublimity and terror in the face of raw nature. While Thoreau's ideal reader was expected to be politically engaged in current affairs and well versed in Greek, Latin, poetry, and travel narrative, Hyde's inviting annotations clarify many of Thoreau's references and recreate the contemporary context of the day, when the nation's westward expansion was bringing to a head the racial tensions that would result in the Civil War.Hyde deems Thoreau's writing prophetic because "the prophet speaks of things that will be true in the future because they are true in all time." Thoreau's revelatory writing coupled with the luminous insights from Hyde--"one of our country's greatest public thinkers" (Lawrence Weschler)--make The Essays of Henry David Thoreau essential reading at a moment in our nation's history when his subversiveness, foresight, and lyricism are badly needed.

An immersive, beautifully illustrated revelation of Henry David Thoreau’s final project—a monthly almanac of natural phenomena. In the last years of his life, Henry David Thoreau created something new. Part blueprint for a major new work, part scientific chart, and part re-envisioning of the way we experience the passage of time, Thoreau’s Kalendar was more a tool than a text. Comprised of six multipage charts of “general phenomena,” the Kalendar was an instrument for recording not just natural and weather-related phenomena, but also the hidden relations among them—between the skies of one June and the skies of past and future Junes—relations we often feel but can’t quite hold, rooted as we typically are in our own brief moment of linear time. Combining reproductions of Thoreau’s hand-drawn charts with transcriptions of the Kalendar’s text and essays by acclaimed poet and scholar Kristen Case, this gorgeously crafted volume illuminates the final project of one of America’s most treasured writers and naturalists and offers a timeless, transformative vision of how to live harmoniously with the living world around us.

A December 2023 Indie Next Pick, selected by booksellersA Kirkus Reviews "Most Anticipated Book of the Fall 2023"From the acclaimed author of Thin Places, a luminous day book about an unexpected year and finding home.Two days after the winter solstice in 2019, Kerri and her partner moved to a remote cottage in the heart of Ireland. They were looking for a home, somewhere to settle into a stable life. Then the pandemic arrived and their secluded abode became a place of enforced isolation. What was meant to be the beginning of an enriching new chapter was instead marked by uncertainty and fear. The seasons still passed, the swallows returned, the rhythms of the natural world went on, but in many ways 2020 was unlike any year we had seen before. And for Kerri there would be one more change: a baby, longed for but utterly, beautifully unexpected.Intensely lyrical, fragmentary in subject and form, Cacophony of Bone is an ode to a year, a place, and a love that transformed a life. When the pandemic came, time seemed to shapeshift; in Kerri's elegant prose, we can trace its quickening, its slowing. She maps the circle of a year--a journey from one place to another, field notes of a life--from one winter to the next, telling of a changed life in a changed world, as well as all that stays the same. All that keeps on living and breathing, nesting and dying. This is a book for the reader who wants to slow down, guided by a voice that is utterly singular, "rich and strange," (Robert Macfarlane). A book about home--the deepening of family, the connections that sustain us.

A marvelous debut novel exploring the fractures caused by the Partition of India, as well as the legacy and contemporary parallels of sectarian violence around the world.Lahore, British India. 1943. As World War rages, resentment of colonial rule grows, and with it acts of rebellion. Animated by idealistic dreams of an independent India, Chhote Nanu agrees to plant a bomb intended for the British superintendent of police. Some four years later, following a torturous imprisonment, Chhote flees the city as it descends into violence. Carrying the young son of his murdered wife through scenes of unspeakable bloodshed, he encounters his brother, Barre Nanu, the two of them caught between a vanishing past in the new nation of Pakistan and a profoundly uncertain future in India.Kanpur, India. 2002. Following the death of his grandfather, Barre Nanu, Karan Khati returns from New York to join his sister in their childhood home, which has been transformed by the embittered Chhote Nanu into a hostel for Hindu pilgrims. When their mother arrives from Delhi, Karan and Ila learn that their fathers were two different men--one Hindu, one Muslim--relationships with both of whom were doomed by familial bias and prejudice, the siblings resolve to reconnect, and to understand the painful twist and turns in the family's story.Moving back and forth from the tumultuous years surrounding Partition to the era of renewed global sectarianism following 9/11, this extraordinary historical novel, "Tolstoyan in its scope" (Ha Jin), portrays a family and nations divided by the living legacy of colonialism. Richly evocative and timely, House of Caravans will endure in the ways only the best literature does.

A ground-breaking collection of poems exploring disability, syntax, and rhythm from a Brooklyn-based Senegalese American writer with cerebral palsy. In this fifth offering from the Multiverse series, Latif Askia Ba--a poet with Choreic Cerebral Palsy--honors all the things that arise from our unique choreographies. Meeting each reader with corporeal generosity, these poems create space to practice a radical reclamation of movement and the body. Together. In dialogue. In disability. At the bodega, in the examination room, on the move. "This way. My body looks like a dancing tattoo." Here, the drum of the body punctuates thought in unexpected and invigorating time signatures.These poems are percussive and syncopated, utilizing a polylingual braid of French, Spanish, Jamaican, Fulani, and Wolof that reminds the Anglophone reader: "I am not here to accommodate you." Because these poems are not so much for you as they are with you, an accompaniment rather than an accommodation, something to be rather than something to own.With startling nuance, The Choreic Period encourages us to "relinquish the things that we have. And mark the thing that we do," all to see and sing the vital "thing that we be."

The North American debut of an acclaimed journalist, Marginlands documents the slow violence of environmental degradation in India's most vulnerable landscapes and populations.India is often represented with textbook tropes--ancient mountains, bustling cities, lush tropical landscapes--but there is much more to this mega-diverse and rapidly modernizing nation. In Marginlands, Arati Kumar-Rao invites readers to join her expeditions to the regions and communities of her homeland that are most impacted by industry and urbanization to learn more about the traditions and adaptive strategies of all those who call these imperiled places home.Among the seemingly featureless dunes of the Thar desert, secret water basins have sustained life for generations, despite the encroaching threat of harsh mining practices. And along the Southwestern tip of the Indian peninsula, one of the most dynamic and densely populated coastlines in the world, is eroding due to the invasive implementation of dams. Elsewhere, Kumar-Rao discovers how state-sanctioned interventions have turned verdant stretches of the Sundarban delta--the world's largest unbroken stretch of mangroves--into a deadly place for local fisherman, and the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna river basin into a desiccated grave.Still, life persists, and echoes of beauty abound--which Kumar-Rao captures faithfully in storytelling grounded by deep empathy for the human and more-than-human worlds. With sweeping lyricism and unmatched attentiveness, she celebrates the overlooked, the unseen, and the anything-but-ordinary, testifying to the power of alternative visions of coexistence and the need for conservational advocacy. At once dazzling and edifying, Marginlands encourages readers from any place to fall in love with the world outside of ourselves and to honor interconnectedness everywhere.

An attentive collection of poems seeking answers about how to live meaningfully in a world saturated by white noise."The question isn't / what exists," writes Sarah V. Schweig in this engrossing collection of poems, "The question is what doesn't / die with us?" Positioned from within the morass of modern-day living, The Ocean in the Next Room searches for the hard, abiding particles of truth buried beneath the mantle of late capitalism. Stillness. Sunsets. The circadian rhythm of trees. These poems guide us to look past content, brands, and relentless jargon to find meaning in those layers of the world that operate without human intervention or interpretation.And yet: "Why this impulse to poetry if I believe the literal all that's left?" In verse that is at once inventive and innately familiar, Schweig unpacks the urge to make art, life, and connections even at the risk of becoming further entangled in the Anthropocene. In the face of the twenty-first century's fearful enormities and its persistent mundanities, she posits, we need reminders that beauty, friendship, and kindness, are all still possible. "We light lights / in the dark. It's a human thing."Profound and clear-sighted, this collection--selected by Cynthia Cruz for the 2023-24 Jake Adam York Prize--urges us to lift our gazes from our screens and really look at the world around us. If we measure our attentions and sharpen our intentions, if we "try again to write / the truth things," we might spy something real on the horizon.

From the award-winning author of Cures for Hunger and Into the Sun, a haunting novel exploring artificial intelligence and the meaning of human existence.Charged initially with a single task--"to never harm humans and to protect them"--an experimental AI project overrides its programming and determines that the best way to accomplish its purpose is to isolate all of the Earth's remaining seven billion human beings in controlled environments. And to present them with vivid, tactile, imagined worlds--some realistic, others entirely fantastical--in which all desires are fulfilled. With the help of the Machine, a memorable cast of characters unpack deeply traumatic memories of the past--one rife with violence after a military coup and second civil war in America. Michael, the entrepreneur who designed the original AI, grapples with the impact of his research. Ava, a painter and Michael's long-ago lover, creates stunning simulated worlds that meld the human with the technological. Their daughter Jae tries to solve the mysteries of her parentage while reliving the harsh reality of life for young women with big ambitions. Haunted by life in the repressive Confederacy, where he was forced to scavenge scrap metal and deal drugs to survive, Simon remembers past loves and losses, guided by the literature he has always turned to in moments of crisis. Raised by the Machine since infancy, Jonah pieces together information about the violence of the past, intent on revenge against the powerful world leaders who caused his family so much pain. And the elusive Lux, whose brilliant programming helped bring the AI to life, dreams of a future in which science will free humans of their limitations and allow them to be reborn as divine machines. As these characters and their memories collide and coalesce, this daring speculative novel tackles the most pressing issues of our time. The power and potential of AI and virtual reality. Repressive social orders that drive people to violence. Genetic modification and designer babies. Gender roles and class divisions. Addiction and drug crisis. The value of free information and speech. The existence of souls. What it means to be happy. What it means, ultimately, to be human. Gorgeously written, bold and unforgettable, this is speculative fiction at its finest.

"From one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers, an urgent and essential collection of poems illuminating the visionary presence of Palestinians."--

"An abundant and anticipatory collection of poems exploring the season of waiting that precedes adoption"--

“Offering a deeply necessary, clear-eyed look at who we are as flesh-and-bone bodies during the climate crisis, this is a book that searches and finds meaning in both the hard truths and the value of wonder.”—Ada LimónIn this luminous collection of essays, Ellen Wayland-Smith probes the raw edges of human existence, those periods of life in which our bodies remind us of our transience and the boundaries of the self dissolve.From the Old Testament to Maggie Nelson, these explorations are grounded in a rich network of associations. In an essay on the postpartum body, Wayland-Smith interweaves her experience as a mother with accounts of phantom limbs and Greek mythology to meditate on moments when pieces of our being exist outside our bodies. In order to comprehend diagnoses of depression and breast cancer, she delves into LA hippie culture’s love affair with crystals and Emily Dickinson’s geological poetry. Her experience with chemotherapy leads to reflection on Western medicine and its intolerance of death and the healing capacity of nature. And throughout, she challenges the false separation between the human and the “primeval, animal mode of being.”At once intimate and expansive, The Science of Last Things peels back layers of human thought and behavior, breaking down our modern conceptions of individuality and reframing us as participants in a world of astounding elegance and mystery.