When did I become a woman who bakes bread
while her dog dies, while her children laugh in the other room
over a joke she will never be privy to, while one forest burns
& another withers with toxic fungus, while children die
under another bomb or beneath the crush of plastic?
Read MoreChronic illnesses are on the rise, particularly autoimmune diseases, and in world where disconnection is the standard, books like these have a chance at helping us move toward healing. Because you can’t survive through hardship without a community and systems that see the hardship too and are willing to walk with you through the unknown, toward healing.
Read More“There are ruins we witness
within the moment of the world’s first awakening
and the birds love you within that moment. They want
to eat the air and the stars they’ve hungered for, little razors.”
“One week away and the forest has changed. / Measured wind, consistent in its image. / First frost, day’s ghost, chattering red-toothed leaves.” A poem from The Maybe-Bird by Jennifer Elise Foerster.
Read MoreI am / paying attention to small beauties / whatever I have — as if it were our duty to / find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world. —Sharon Olds, “Little Things”
Read MoreMy imagination wants to redeem the bareness of fact,
so I imagine the field he dies in as a place we might
have picnicked, imagine wind entering his clothes
and leaving again
Read More“Every day from the twelfth to the nineteenth, Alice went over to see Einar. He was lying in bed more often now, which made his feet easier to get at. She removed his socks and massaged his feet, lumpy as they were, because it felt so nice, she knew it did".”
—from “On Narrow Paved Paths” by Dorthe Nors in Wild Swims.
Read More“I’m not dying yet, but she wants to be sure.
She asks me to deliver a ransom of syringes."
—from “Auto-Immune” by Destiny O. Birdsong
Read MoreJohn Freeman on wonder in Orion, all things Wendy Erskine, an abandoned mine town in Naimbia, on Looking Closely by Craig Mod, and new Elif Shafak is coming in this cabinet of curiosities.
Read More“And I don’t know
what might bring peace on earth. But a man
fallen asleep at his desk while revising
a letter…”
—from “Love Succeeding” by Li-Young Lee from The Undressing
Read More“Her real life was beginning now, and she never doubted its meaning. Among the powerful and strange she would be mute and watchful. She would swim like a little fish, and learn to breathe underwater”
Read More“…the only remedy is to resolutely abandon the larger for the smaller field, to narrow one’s vision to one’s pencil, and do the small thing closely and deeply rather than the big thing loosely and superficially.”
Read MoreEcosystems kept collapsing in sight, out of sight, and I had to work hard to remember that loss and abundance co-exist, and both are true
Read More“Another admirer. How their ranks swelled. They could erect a monument to her in the town square. An extremely fucking likeable woman — that’s what the plaque could say.”
—Erin Somers, “Ten Year Affair” in Joyland
Read MoreA cabinet of curiosities containing: Hayao Miyazaki, missing snow, Annie Dillard, birds in flight, and Little Gods by Meng Jin.
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