On Beauty and Violence
December 11, 2023
And now I do the thing I have always hesitated to do — no longer defending, but attacking.
Guernica
Bodies & Nature
Essay
EssayThe Cutting Room
Hospital Journal
December 13, 2022
Words try to blot death up, but death leaks faster than language can soak.
AudioPoetry
Radical Surgeon of My Own Life
October 19, 2022
To wait for something to open, that’s optimism.
Poetry
spirit animal
September 14, 2022
At this point, / my body’s beastly smell / starts to be all that matters.
Sketches
Postpartum
August 15, 2022
Her swollen breasts leaked colostrum through a printed green sheath dress that she had sewn herself.
Poetry
In the Middle of August, I Saw the Sky
August 10, 2022
One morning, on a wet day during the week...
AudioPoetry
Bringing Up Mother
July 13, 2022
I was not dressed correctly when / motherhood interviewed me.
Essay
Hook, Line, and Sinker
July 12, 2022
Invasive species are a problem not only of trade and climate change but also of language.
EssaySpotlights
The Seven-Year Cycle
July 5, 2022
This is my introduction to dying. It is a good place to die — in a Changi Women’s Prison cell.
AudioPoetry
If I Say My Body Is Asian Does This Poem Disappear
June 29, 2022
Another poem mannequin- / Ing the body.
EssaySpotlights
rising to the earth’s height
June 21, 2022
The story of the mimosa pudica and the snowshoe hare.
Back DraftInterview
Back Draft: Meghan O’Rourke
March 1, 2022
The memoirist talks about the limitations of “the traditional illness narrative” and what healing really means.
Apostrophe
To Be Black and Restful on the Body of the Earth
February 14, 2022
I wonder what it means for me to shape my body inside a lineage of men’s conquest, inside a received tradition of mastery over land and gender.
Essay
Itasca, Alight
November 22, 2021
I was twenty the first time I saw wildfire reduce a forest to moonscape.
Essay
Shark’s Eye
November 16, 2021
The more I learned about the pain humans can cause each other, the more I turned to sharks.
Poetry
The Show of Growth
August 19, 2021
"And right there and then, I showed her, I wouldn’t be of much use."
Interview
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: “I’m one part of the universe, trying to figure out another part of the universe.”
August 2, 2021
On quarks, leptons, and the patriarchy.
Fiction
Speed of Mercy
July 30, 2021
Mal wanted to prove she was more than a thirty-year-old podcaster and obscure short-story writer living in her mother’s garage apartment gobbling mango lassi and Doritos.
Essay
Out to Sea
July 15, 2021
It was clear that in addition to the physical damage, the whales had experienced severe psychological distress.
EssayPhotography
Roots of Memory
July 14, 2021
The next installment in the Memory Loss series, exploring public and private remembrance in New York City, unearths the complex lives of living memorials.
Poetry
relapse dream
May 20, 2021
"& when will i be emptied by what a night doesn’t promise instead of what it does”
Essay
Wolf Peach
May 12, 2021
We are biologically driven to make more of ourselves, and propagate the earth, and steer our sisters from madness.
Fiction
Earthlings
April 9, 2021
You tunneled into reason: that many earthlings you had observed had enjoyed ecstatic many moments already where they had relaxed into the comfort of being invisible.
Review
Cat Dreams
April 7, 2021
Doris Lessing’s unsentimental book On Cats provides strange comfort during a pandemic.
Lives
There’s No Simple Way to Make it OK
March 31, 2021
I was enamored with the notion that all I had to do to drive the sadness away, to have something to look forward to, was open a can of meadows.
Poetry
Poem About Human Habits of Consumption That Begins with Contemplating the Walnut in My Yard
January 14, 2021
Who parted / your shell, in wedge & tear?
Commentary
Stitching and Writing on the Margin
January 25, 2021
Former journalist Sabine Heinlein is charting the history of zoonotic diseases not on magazine covers, but quilts.
Essay
Year of the Rat
November 24, 2020
The rat marks this year as the beginning of some kind of new cycle, though what will be new, and whether or not it will be good, is unknowable.
Commentary
Cold Inside: Sexual Climate Change
November 19, 2020
Even before the pandemic, no one wanted to have sex. Now desexualization is a global crisis.
Poetry
Dispatch from the Clorox War
November 19, 2020
I believe there are two worlds. / In one of them I clean it all, / all the time.
Essay
On the Road
November 16, 2020
I loaded up on hand sanitizer and masks, and sketched out a route that would take me to places I’d never seen before.
Essay
Named After the Animal
October 13, 2020
My beloved gave me language instead of seed. I let it grow in the places where my loss emptied me out.
Fiction
Popol Vuh: A Retelling
September 25, 2020
In a similar way, a child is like saliva: the parent’s essence is in it. The face of his parents is in the child’s, although at times one must look hard to find it.
Essay
Fever in the Woods
August 26, 2020
Tucked far away with my children, this is where I feel safest and most afraid.
Essay
Fitness: How the Climate Killed My Children
August 20, 2020
If we won’t change to save ourselves, what hope is there for our children?
Fiction
The New Wilderness
August 14, 2020
Agnes smiled through the pain. “They wouldn’t,” she said almost shyly, and Bea watched Agnes’s face contort, trying to imagine coyotes snuffling her hair.
Interview
Diane Cook: “Our humanity is what makes us so particularly wild.”
August 10, 2020
The author reflects on writing the physical world into fiction, what makes someone a “bad mom,” and what a wilderness community has in common with The Office.
Poetry
Pandemic Jobs for Poets
August 7, 2020
Young poets join the army: burial of the dead is already / on your resume.
Essay
Alone in the Wilderness, Again and Again
July 22, 2020
Dick Proenneke has achieved something mythical: he seems happy.
Essay
The Loneliest City
June 18, 2020
Laura Aguilar’s Southern California photography reveals the intimacy and the isolation that have always been part of the fabric of Los Angeles.
Commentary
Will COVID-19 Strengthen our Bonds?
May 12, 2020
Living with chronic illness in the midst of a pandemic requires a new map.
Essay
Becoming Animal
May 6, 2020
All of us touching our faces, touching habitats, dislodging species.
Essay
The Pandemic Novelist Has Regrets
April 26, 2020
In books and movies we've imagined it would take a gruesome virus to push working people to the edge. In reality, late capitalism is enough.
Essay
Ordinary Insanity
April 7, 2020
America’s fetishization of reproductive risk is driving mothers mad.
Poetry
Your Name Means Garden
March 27, 2020
What does it mean to graduate / your way through the world?
Essay
Medusa and the Invention of Spells
March 25, 2020
A spell is most effective when you want something and can remember a time it already existed.
LivesPhotography
Faery Land
March 24, 2020
“Don’t take chances,” he said. “Given your history.” But chances, not history, are what we’re given.
Poetry
Hurricanes with the Names of My Friends
March 13, 2020
We are disappearing into / the map’s folds. Small birds. Smaller ones.
Fiction
Schrödinger’s Dog
March 10, 2020
The doctor talked about the operation: “Major surgery, but the techniques are well understood.” He spelled out the risks: 80 percent success rate.
Commentary
The Cover of My Face
March 10, 2020
A trans author reflects on the fraught history of trans women’s memoir covers, and why she didn’t want her likeness on her own.
Interview
Darcey Steinke: How to Be in a Body
March 3, 2020
The writer embraces menopause, matriarchy, and the language of the body.
Poetry
[You button this coat as if one sleeve]
February 28, 2020
making room for the night sky / the dead try on
Essay
Beasts of the Fields
February 19, 2020
Family heartache on the northern New York border, and the creatures that bore witness to it.
Poetry
Blank Notes
February 14, 2020
How about adopting a fully grown girl? Says a broken-headed doll.
Fiction
Just After the Wave
January 14, 2020
Perrine and Noah are hungry. But they don’t know how to wring a chicken’s neck, how to empty out its innards and pluck it.
AudioPoetry
The Empty City
January 10, 2020
I went to the doctor and found out / there is an empty city inside me.
Fiction
Little Gods
January 8, 2020
Who have I been? I am an ordinary man, but would my past, put down on paper, make me look cruel?
Fiction
These Bad Things
December 23, 2019
One night, when he was seven or eight, she read her son a story from a book called These Bad Things. It was surprisingly scary, and she knew she should stop, but they were so far in. She wanted to see how it ended.
AudioPoetry
Milk Teeth
December 23, 2019
I lean my open neck against yours. / The miracle always returns with a hunger.
Essay
What the Doctor Ordered
December 9, 2019
Caring for a dying patient, a pediatrician wrestles with questions of suffering and salvation.
Essay
Coming into Bloom
November 26, 2019
Finding love and making peace with impermanence, with a little help from some sunflowers.
Essay
Turning, Unfolding, Passing Through
November 14, 2019
“Past their prime,” my mother says, shaking her head at pears forgotten on the kitchen counter, turning to rot.
Interview
Diana Marie Delgado: The Germ of Someone
November 12, 2019
The poet on growing up around storytellers, understanding the charming trickster, and acknowledging women’s trauma.
Interview
Mira Ptacin: What Does It Feel Like to Have a Ghost in the Room?
October 28, 2019
In her new book, Ptacin goes deep with mediums and clairvoyants, and embraces the unknown.
Fiction
The Girl Gangs of Pacific Avenue
October 16, 2019
I was out in the front garden weeding between the about-to-bloom tiger lilies the first time I saw them. Four girls in bathing suits and flip-flops, their mouths popsicle red and Italian-ice blue.
Essay
Why We Cry When We’re Angry
October 8, 2019
I feel like an electric line, snapped from the pole by the wind. A live wire. I spark against the ground.
Poetry
Out of Water
October 4, 2019
The sea of simpler songs only the drowned and the fish know to sing.
Fiction
Evidence of V: A Novel in Fragments, Facts, & Fictions
October 2, 2019
At first it was a pale shrimp curled pink inside V’s belly; now it is a mammal the size of a small cat. V feels its gnawing paws claw at her ribs, feels the burrow of its skull between her legs, a thrashing angry animal fighting at the cave where it’s been kept.
Interview
Wendy S. Walters: There Is No Neutral Body
September 25, 2019
Loneliness, anti-blackness, and the need to tell new stories on the 400th anniversary of the first ship carrying enslaved Africans to the New World
Essay
I Am Telling You What Happened To Me
September 18, 2019
I keep coming back to the violence before the violence, the moment of narrative rupture.
Fiction
Carrot Legs
September 12, 2019
I brought my lips to my calf and licked. I thought, only for a second, that I could taste the faint bitterness of daikon radish.
Report
Holy Love, Holy Rage
August 27, 2019
A female, feminist minister on the personal and political battle for reproductive rights in the South.
AudioPoetry
indelible in the hippocampus
August 20, 2019
Memory is no solid monument but liquid’s / twins of substance and ceaseless swell.