Essay

The Language of Women

By Rachel York May 4, 2021

Searching for the origins of shame.

Bodies & Nature

Fiction

Earthlings

By Jeff VanderMeer 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.

Bodies & Nature

Review

Cat Dreams

By Lily Houston Smith April 7, 2021

Doris Lessing’s unsentimental book On Cats provides strange comfort during a pandemic.

Arts & Culture Bodies & Nature

Lives

There’s No Simple Way to Make it OK

By Kathy Davis 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.

Bodies & Nature Climate & Environment

Commentary

Stitching and Writing on the Margin

By Roslyn Bernstein January 25, 2021

Former journalist Sabine Heinlein is charting the history of zoonotic diseases not on magazine covers, but quilts.

Arts & Culture Bodies & Nature

Poetry

Poem About Human Habits of Consumption That Begins with Contemplating the Walnut in My Yard

Poetry by Felicia Zamora January 14, 2021

Who parted / your shell, in wedge & tear?

Bodies & Nature

Essay

The Grief Artist

By Traci Brimhall January 6, 2021

In the wake of a loss comes the urge to create.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Essay

Year of the Rat

By Simona Blat 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.

Bodies & Nature

Commentary

Cold Inside: Sexual Climate Change

By Helena Feder November 19, 2020

Even before the pandemic, no one wanted to have sex. Now desexualization is a global crisis.

Bodies & Nature Sex Technology & the Future

Poetry

Dispatch from the Clorox War

Poetry by Andrea Cote Botero, translated from the Spanish by Craig Epplin November 19, 2020

I believe there are two worlds. / In one of them I clean it all, / all the time.

Bodies & Nature

Essay

On the Road

By Meg Bernhard 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.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Poetry

Ambergris and Gasoline

Poetry by Patrick Meeds October 29, 2020

Imagine what that’s like for the whale.

Bodies & Nature

Essay

Named After the Animal

By Sarah Panlibuton Barnes October 13, 2020

My beloved gave me language instead of seed. I let it grow in the places where my loss emptied me out.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Poetry

Clock Hands

By C.X. Hua October 1, 2020

My bones say / don’t you have any place to be.

Bodies & Nature

Fiction

Popol Vuh: A Retelling

An excerpt of the novel by Ilan Stavans 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.

Americas Bodies & Nature Religion

Poetry

Acarapis woodi

Poetry by Matt McBride September 24, 2020

“Breathing makes us susceptible.”

Bodies & Nature

Poetry

9 dreams

By Nicole Cecilia Delgado, translated from the Spanish by Katie Marya August 27, 2020

I feel as though I’ve dreamed / something terrible, but I don’t remember / what.

Arts & Culture Bodies & Nature

Essay

Fever in the Woods

By Hillery Stone August 26, 2020

Tucked far away with my children, this is where I feel safest and most afraid.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Essay

Fitness: How the Climate Killed My Children

By Joseph Osmundson August 20, 2020

If we won’t change to save ourselves, what hope is there for our children?

Bodies & Nature Climate & Environment

Fiction

The New Wilderness

An excerpt of the novel by Diane Cook 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.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Interview

Diane Cook: “Our humanity is what makes us so particularly wild.”

By Rachel Heng 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.

Bodies & Nature Lit World

Poetry

Pandemic Jobs for Poets

Poetry by Beth Bachmann August 7, 2020

Young poets join the army: burial of the dead is already / on your resume.

Bodies & Nature

Essay

Alone in the Wilderness, Again and Again

By Amy Marsh July 22, 2020

Dick Proenneke has achieved something mythical: he seems happy.

Bodies & Nature Climate & Environment

Audio Poetry

Home

Poetry by Jamaica Baldwin July 17, 2020

I was mesmerized by how willing her skin / was to leave her.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Poetry

[in this ancestral land]

Poetry by Alain Mabanckou, translated from the French by Nancy Naomi Carlson July 2, 2020

barbed wire circling raised voices

Bodies & Nature

Copyright protected. Use of materials from this collection beyond the exceptions provided for in the Fair Use and Educational Use clauses of the U.S. Copyright Law may violate federal law. Permission to publish or reproduce is required.

Essay

The Loneliest City

By Rosa Boshier 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.

Arts & Culture Bodies & Nature USA

Commentary

Will COVID-19 Strengthen our Bonds?

By Jennifer Stitt May 12, 2020

Living with chronic illness in the midst of a pandemic requires a new map.

Bodies & Nature Health

Essay

Becoming Animal

By Kimi Eisele May 6, 2020

All of us touching our faces, touching habitats, dislodging species.

Bodies & Nature Health

Essay

The Pandemic Novelist Has Regrets

By Thea Lim 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.

Bodies & Nature Health

Essay

Ordinary Insanity

By Sarah Menkedick April 7, 2020

America’s fetishization of reproductive risk is driving mothers mad.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Poetry

Your Name Means Garden

Poetry by Innas Tsuroiya March 27, 2020

What does it mean to graduate / your way through the world?

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Essay

Medusa and the Invention of Spells

By Kathryn Nuernberger March 25, 2020

A spell is most effective when you want something and can remember a time it already existed.

Arts & Culture Bodies & Nature

Lives Photography

Faery Land

By Jeff Sharlet March 24, 2020

“Don’t take chances,” he said. “Given your history.” But chances, not history, are what we’re given.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Poetry

Hurricanes with the Names of My Friends

Poetry by Jonathan Aprea March 13, 2020

We are disappearing into / the map’s folds. Small birds. Smaller ones.

Arts & Culture Bodies & Nature

Fiction

Schrödinger’s Dog

An excerpt from the novel by Martin Dumont, translated from the French by John Cullen 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.

Bodies & Nature Health

Commentary

The Cover of My Face

By Meredith Talusan 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.

Bodies & Nature Gender Lit World

Essay

The Terrarium

By Brice Particelli March 5, 2020

The flat earth community has been on a fast, upward climb.

Bodies & Nature Politics

Interview

Darcey Steinke: How to Be in a Body

By Elizabeth Lothian March 3, 2020

The writer embraces menopause, matriarchy, and the language of the body.

Bodies & Nature

Poetry

[You button this coat as if one sleeve]

Poetry by Simon Perchik February 28, 2020

making room for the night sky / the dead try on

Bodies & Nature

Essay

Beasts of the Fields

By Aimée Baker February 19, 2020

Family heartache on the northern New York border, and the creatures that bore witness to it.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Poetry

Blank Notes

Poetry by Lee Young-ju, translated from the Korean by Jae Kim February 14, 2020

How about adopting a fully grown girl? Says a broken-headed doll.

Bodies & Nature Gender

Fiction

Thirteen

Fiction by Kim Yi-seol, translated from the Korean by Janet Hong January 30, 2020

The real reason every one of them backed away, scared shitless, was because of her hard, black nipples. Her nipples were more terrifying than the curses her mouth spewed or the fire in her eyes.

Bodies & Nature Class Family & Relationships

Poetry

Morning

Poetry by Yi Sang, translated from the Korean by Michael Joseph Walsh and Jae Kim January 24, 2020

there’s so much of it, this night

Arts & Culture Bodies & Nature

Fiction

Just After the Wave

An excerpt of the novel by Sandrine Collette, translated from the French by Alison Anderson 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.

Bodies & Nature

Audio Poetry

The Empty City

Poetry by Michael Bazzett January 10, 2020

I went to the doctor and found out / there is an empty city inside me.

Bodies & Nature

Fiction

Little Gods

An excerpt of the novel by Meng Jin January 8, 2020

Who have I been? I am an ordinary man, but would my past, put down on paper, make me look cruel?

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Fiction

These Bad Things

Fiction by Danielle Dutton 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.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Audio Poetry

Milk Teeth

Poetry by Gale Marie Thompson December 23, 2019

I lean my open neck against yours. / The miracle always returns with a hunger.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Essay

What the Doctor Ordered

By Margaret Wardlaw December 9, 2019

Caring for a dying patient, a pediatrician wrestles with questions of suffering and salvation.

Bodies & Nature Health

Essay

Coming into Bloom

By DJ Cashmere November 26, 2019

Finding love and making peace with impermanence, with a little help from some sunflowers.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Poetry

Snow Hare

Poetry by Alycia Pirmohamed November 22, 2019

you know how to pull down a tree / with only your teeth

Bodies & Nature

Essay

Turning, Unfolding, Passing Through

By Ellen Wayland-Smith November 14, 2019

“Past their prime,” my mother says, shaking her head at pears forgotten on the kitchen counter, turning to rot.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Interview

Diana Marie Delgado: The Germ of Someone

By Nicole Treska November 12, 2019

The poet on growing up around storytellers, understanding the charming trickster, and acknowledging women’s trauma.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Interview

Mira Ptacin: What Does It Feel Like to Have a Ghost in the Room?

By Sarah Kasbeer October 28, 2019

In her new book, Ptacin goes deep with mediums and clairvoyants, and embraces the unknown.

Bodies & Nature Religion

Fiction

The Girl Gangs of Pacific Avenue

Fiction by Heather Kamins 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.

Bodies & Nature Gender Sex

Essay

Why We Cry When We’re Angry

By Marissa Korbel October 8, 2019

I feel like an electric line, snapped from the pole by the wind. A live wire. I spark against the ground.

Bodies & Nature

Poetry

Out of Water

Poetry by Luis Chaves, translated from the Spanish by Julia Guez and Samantha Zighelboim October 4, 2019

The sea of simpler songs only the drowned and the fish know to sing.

Bodies & Nature

Fiction

Evidence of V: A Novel in Fragments, Facts, & Fictions

An excerpt of the novel by Sheila O'Connor 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.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Interview

Wendy S. Walters: There Is No Neutral Body

By Amy Wright 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

Bodies & Nature Race

Essay

I Am Telling You What Happened To Me

By Susannah Nevison September 18, 2019

I keep coming back to the violence before the violence, the moment of narrative rupture.

Bodies & Nature Conflict

Fiction

Carrot Legs

Fiction by Elaine Hsieh Chou 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.

Bodies & Nature

Report

Holy Love, Holy Rage

By Darcy Roake August 27, 2019

A female, feminist minister on the personal and political battle for reproductive rights in the South.

Bodies & Nature Justice Religion

Audio Poetry

indelible in the hippocampus

Poetry by Caroline Crew August 20, 2019

Memory is no solid monument but liquid’s / twins of substance and ceaseless swell.

Bodies & Nature

Poetry

Untitled

Poetry by Jane Mead July 25, 2019

The moon in the trees was a good moon, / The world in the sound-bite, a good world.

Bodies & Nature

Lives

Blood Oranges

By Carla Bruce-Eddings July 24, 2019

I watched my skin split, tender and pliant as fruit.

Bodies & Nature

Poetry

Epithalamion in the Field

Poetry by I.S. Jones July 17, 2019

the red, wet animal in my chest throbs Your name.

Bodies & Nature

Lives

Beautiful in the Distance

By Josh Potter June 24, 2019

The tick doesn’t know that it is strong enough to kill a full-grown human. It only knows that it is hungry.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Poetry

How A Bird Dies

Poetry by Háel Lopez, translated from the Spanish by Ariel Francisco June 20, 2019

Every bird should have the right / to never touch the ground

Bodies & Nature

Interview

Becoming a Map for Survival: Interview with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

By Lisa Factora-Borchers June 18, 2019

The writer on resisting racist ableist erasure in her latest essay collection about disability justice.

Arts & Culture Bodies & Nature

Fiction

The Paper Wasp

Fiction by Lauren Acampora June 3, 2019

The sun was ruthless, impressing a sense of danger with each step I took away from the road. The heat was primordial, baking through my skin, drying my muscle and bones, desiccating everything but my darkest, wettest core.

Bodies & Nature

Poetry

Dream Seminar

Poetry by Tomas Tranströmer, translated from the Swedish by Patty Crane May 22, 2019

Every dream is crowded with faces and bodies— / there are more dreamed people than there are us.

Bodies & Nature

Lives

Letters to Mothers: Crones, Hags, Witches, and Killjoys

By Sophia Shalmiyev and Leni Zumas May 15, 2019

Mother’s Day is a joke we are all in on, and yet it continues—straight-faced, deadly serious, and poisoned.

Bodies & Nature Gender

Lives

Squirrel King

By Steven A. Miller May 9, 2019

The city didn’t put stop signs at our suburban corner until I was thirteen. Despite the reckless driving, no one was ever killed. Pet dogs and stray cats weren’t so lucky. Neither were the squirrels.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Poetry

A Wedding, or What We Unlearned from Descartes

Poetry by Kemi Alabi May 8, 2019

Yes / body, you are owed a whole lake.

Bodies & Nature

Poetry

Frieze

Poetry by Erin Elizabeth Smith April 11, 2019

And I don't know then / how to disappear enough / for neither of us to see me

Bodies & Nature

Lives

Life and Death in West Virginia

By Christa Parravani April 5, 2019

I’m in a haunted place, in my home and in my body.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Poetry

Ontological

Poetry by Peter Cooley March 27, 2019

I am the name behind the names, remembering / my origins at the formation of the world.

Bodies & Nature

Audio Poetry

Auto-Immune

By Destiny Birdsong February 27, 2019

I am destined to infuse / survival with meaning, like honey clotting in syringes.

Bodies & Nature

Essay

What Remains

By Jacqueline Alnes February 21, 2019

How can I write a history of myself without remembering? And why am I compelled to?

Americas Bodies & Nature

Fiction

Major Long Talks to His Horse

Fiction by Terese Svoboda February 20, 2019

Innumerable buffalo have the temerity to appear at a distance just as he is solving the problem of the design of a steam carriage. Link them together! he shouts to his horse.

Bodies & Nature USA

Poetry

Swimming Pool

Poetry by Aleš Šteger, translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry February 18, 2019

I accept everything. I renounce everything. / I sink into everything, clothed only in a wet beard.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Essay

White Witchery

By Elissa Washuta February 14, 2019

I just want a version of the occult that isn’t built on plunder, but I suspect that if we could excise the stolen pieces, there would be nothing left.

Bodies & Nature

Interview

Heather Widdows: The Ugly Side of Beauty

By Regan Penaluna January 30, 2019

The philosopher on how our appearance intolerance hinders ideas and human flourishing

Bodies & Nature Gender

Poetry

The Meal

Poetry by Gemma Gorga, translated from the Catalan by Sharon Dolin January 10, 2019

death reviews the menu for the umpteenth time, / repeats our names between its teeth

Bodies & Nature

Poetry

/ˈməT͟Hər/

Poetry by Tiana Nobile December 21, 2018

We tend to our roles like we tend to a fire, / poking the coals with the blazing tip of an iron.

Bodies & Nature

Poetry

Blind River

Poetry by Diane Mehta December 13, 2018

We have long ties to sunlight, / equations that always solve for equality.

Bodies & Nature

Interview

Tyrese Coleman: Writing the Truth, Unbound by Genre

By Sarah Kasbeer December 5, 2018

The author of How to Sit discusses her mixed genre, multi-generational essays about black girlhood, womanhood, trauma, and triumph.

Bodies & Nature Race Sex

Poetry

The Weight of the Sun

Poetry by Charlotte Pence November 21, 2018

I like being / reminded that we all began in dark and stars

Bodies & Nature

Poetry

River

By Amy Roa November 14, 2018

Then one of them kissed a live, flopping catfish and said it was her husband now.

Bodies & Nature

Fiction

Grace

Fiction by Elle Nash October 30, 2018

My body began to itch, as if the unease I felt about the wolf spider was somehow moving from the inside of my body to the outside.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Lives

Late-Life Love

By Susan Gubar October 23, 2018

Old lovers know that love does not conquer all, that our intimacy cannot establish a safe haven somewhere, someplace, for us.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Poetry

Little Mouse

Poetry by Robert Walser, translated from the German by Daniele Pantano October 18, 2018

I stood still and said: What is this? / Why do you lie here so quietly?

Bodies & Nature

Essay

When a Scar Is a Choice

By Charlee Dyroff October 12, 2018

A former athlete reflects on the physical reminders of her years on the court.

Bodies & Nature

Poetry

The Stone in the River

Poetry by José Watanabe, translated from the Spanish by Michelle Har Kim October 1, 2018

When we rose up from the murky water / we'd scale it like lizards.

Bodies & Nature

Poetry

Highlands

Poetry by Fatema Roshan, translated from the Persian by Farzana Marie September 6, 2018

Oh, uncles, / what zealous men you are!

Bodies & Nature

Fiction

What We Can Learn from Ancient Asexuals

Fiction by Jane Dykema July 31, 2018

He ran his fingertips over the walls as he passed, as if it were a new wall to him and he wanted to learn about it, as if it kept him attached to earth, as if he might otherwise lift up slowly and never land again.

Bodies & Nature

Poetry

the last prayer

Poetry by Chibụìhè Obi July 23, 2018

i asked this of shame / be a stranger

Bodies & Nature

Audio Poetry

Poet Wrestling with the Possibility She’s Living in a Simulation

Poetry by Rosebud Ben-Oni June 25, 2018

One simulation to another, am I wrong.

Bodies & Nature Technology & the Future

Interview

Porochista Khakpour: Bodily Chaos

By Hillary Brenhouse June 13, 2018

The author on her new memoir, SICK; searching for home; and her struggle to be heard by the medical establishment.

Bodies & Nature Gender Health

Poetry

Eye Bank

Poetry by Ahmad Faraz, translated from Urdu by Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb June 6, 2018

Tell them come take my eyes / Before my body gives out

Bodies & Nature Conflict