Tabla de contenidos para Autumn 2019 en Orion

THE NEXT U.S. presidential election is still over a year away, but one thing is already clear: climate is no longer a marginal topic. At least on the Democratic side, every candidate has a formed opinion about the climate emergency and some semblance of a plan to solve it. That’s an encouraging trend, for it wasn’t all that long ago that entire election cycles would go by without any substantial discussion of climate — or, for the matter, the health of the environment in general. But talk is cheap. Addressing the climate emergency will be a terribly difficult thing to do, one that will require the rethinking of almost all aspects of how American culture works. It will involve an enormous amount of coordination across many independent and varied sectors…

LAST WEEK, when I swung by the assisted living facility for a quick hello, Gram surprised me with the news that she had been a good Catholic girl from Yonkers — the Irish Mick from the Big City — and that she had maintained her chastity right up to her very wedding night. Is news the appropriate word for such a disclosure? Being her grandson, I was slightly put off by this saucy talk, and suggested we pour ourselves some ginger ales in little clear plastic cups and head to the patio where we could talk weather instead. At ninety-five years old, Gram likes the weather, no doubt about it. Specifically, she likes the clouds that are the weather’s heart and soul — how they flop around in the sky,…

MY SON, just five years old and spry, shambles down a small, dry, high-desert wash beneath junipers and ocotillo, mumbling a song. I listen to his words, mostly fun nonsense rhyming words, for a hint that he gets it—gets the wonderful and desperate science of this place. His singing suddenly stops. “Feet!” he yells. He’s found a bear track in the sand near a holdout of water—snowmelt from the nine-thousand-foot peaks of the Chiricahua Mountains that rise just north of the U.S.–Mexico border. We see the claw points, heavy toes, and metacarpal pads dug in deep where the bear leaned in heavy for a drink. We can almost hear an ursine tongue lapping the ephemeral water. Farther on, mouse bones bleach under a sad flower, and my son collects a…

For more than twelve years, Jesse Wilson has eaten, slept, read, showered, dreamed, and shat in a seven-by-twelve-foot room. His sink sits on top of his toilet. His bed is a concrete slab. His four-inch-wide window is angled so that a slice of sky is all he sees of the world outside. For every twenty-three hours inside this room, he may, or may not, get an hour away — time alone in a workout room so drab inmates nicknamed it “the empty swimming pool.” “Day and night bleed into one long sigh,” he writes in a letter from his cell in ADX Florence, a supermax prison designed to house our nation’s most dangerous prisoners. The complex is located in Colorado, though for Jesse’s purposes it might as well be on…

IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for the lawyers to arrive. In the spring of 2014, the elected officials of tiny Grant Township in Central Pennsylvania (population 741) began taking steps to halt a proposal from Pennsylvania General Energy (PGE) to inject toxic waste into the ground beneath them. The company’s fracking operations across the state produce millions of gallons of chemically contaminated and radioactive water, which have previously been trucked and then dumped into rural communities in Ohio. To save money on trucking, the company decided to dump the waste closer to where it was produced — in this case, into an abandoned natural gas well in Grant Township. Finding that a majority of frack wells are reported to leak their contents into the surrounding earth, contaminating drinking water supplies and…

1. I mostly keep it bottled away, this three-year period of my life in which I obsessively sucked on breath mints, learned how to remove the smell of rancid almond oil from sheets, plunged my swollen forearms in bowls of ice at the end of the day, and developed opinions about the Irish singer Enya. 2. If teachers teach what they most need to learn, massage therapists first come to bodywork out of their own need to heal. Some have grown up with scoliosis; others have a history of assault or abuse. Some come in response to illness or death. 3. In the world of holistic health, the smell of lavender is ubiquitous to the point of being ordinary. Lavender is the most popular essential oil, one preferred by massage…

Who Owns England? GUY SHRUBSOLE HarperCollins, 2019. $15.99, 384 pages. The New Enclosure BRETT CHRISTOPHERS Verso, 2018. $29.95, 384 pages. THE FIFTEENTH EARL of Darby, Edward Stanley, wasn’t thinking like a responsible member of the English nobility when he expounded on the benefits of landownership in 1881. “The object which men aim at when they become possessed of land in the British Isles may, I think, be enumerated as follows.” Political influence topped the list. Social importance came next, “founded on territorial possession, the most visible and unmistakable form of wealth.” Then came the power over one’s tenants, followed by the pleasures of improving and riding over the estate, and finally, the money that flowed to the lord in return for his monopoly control of his slice of earth —…

NATHANIEL RICH MCD, 2019. $25, 224 pages. WHAT DO YOU DO when the past is no longer a guide to the future? Because of climate change, our historical understandings of and reliance on Earth’s weather patterns and seasons are outdated. Our lived experience can no longer predict the world we’ll face in the coming years, much less season to season or week to week. But when it comes to the story of this existential threat, Nathaniel Rich’s Losing Earth: A Recent History proves all too accurate a guide. If you can make it beyond the first twenty-five pages’ heartbreak and reconcile yourself to the fact that we’ll reach the beginning of the end in sixteen short years, you’ll see that Rich lays out a concise, elegant case history. He reconstructs…

Eloisa Amezcua’s debut collection, From the Inside Quietly, is the winner of the Shelterbelt Poetry Prize. Amezcua is the founder of Costura Creative. Andrea Carrubba is a photojournalist focused on social and humanitarian stories. His work has been exhibited across Italy. Craig Childs has published more than a dozen critically acclaimed books, most recently Virga & Bone. He is a contributing editor at Adventure Journal Quarterly, and his work has appeared in The Atlantic and the New York Times. Camille T. Dungy’s most recent books are Trophic Cascade and Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History. John Freeman edits Freeman’s and Literary Hub and is the author of the books How to Read a Novelist and The Tyranny of E-mail. His story in this issue is excerpted…

THE SUN WAS setting as my backpacking group and I headed back to our campsite from Cinder Cone in Lassen Volcanic National Park. We walked in silence, falling into a rhythm. The march of our steps and crunching of dry earth beneath feet grounded me. I felt anchored between two worlds: the physical and the psychological. My feet moved forward while my mind wandered capriciously. One moment, my sight fixed on trees; the next, on ants moving along familiar terrain. The land was theirs as they wound to a location unknown to me. Ants, I would come to learn, are cooperative insects, and this cooperation hinges on establishing a community of likeness. If an ant possesses the same pheromones as the colony it tries to join, it is freely admitted.…

The channel between one life and another has always been subjectto sudden explosions. Those swallowsmust have been exhausted. The birds alighted in the thousands on the sails, ropes, and yardsof the Abd-el-Kader. I began with birds, thousands. Some wandered into cabins, ate from passengers’ delighted hands. I will return to the birds, but you should know the Abd-el-Kader was named for a man who died five years before they blacked the sky around the boat that bore his name. If you don’t know how many died, how many more he saved, in the decades of conflict between France and Algiers while Abd-el-Kader was emir, maybe you won’t know what a wonder this was to report. I read about it in The New York Times. This must have sounded, in those…

Spring never lasts long, even in a seasonless place. After a few decades, the locals stop visiting, and soon it’s all foreigners who pose in front of my altar, inebriated. None of them offer anything. I’ve seen my shores devastated, swallowed by the angry gills of typhoons. I’ve seen my waters froth with trash. Foreigners piss into my ocean narrowly missing the sharks, and sometimes on my vengeful days I wish a shark would bite them, but mostly, I want quiet. I want this small mercy. I want to dive into the Andaman but this time, swim with the damselfish. This time, the electric eels would protect me. Above us, the karst blesses us with silence. For centuries their skins have eroded. For lifetimes they’ve listened to my sorrows.…

I am bathing again, burying my face into the great nations of moss. I am leaning in, smelling the emerald mountains and the little inhabitants crossing over rock-like boulders and tree trunks empired bit by bit. My nose must come to them like a probing spaceship causing a mighty eclipse. They speak in whispers but do not shriek when gazing into the dim landing bays of my cavernous thoughts. I am grazing like a Dionysian. I come not with religion. I come yearning for first spring and a thirst for spores pooling like mercenaries in the dark even as we speak. The little gods of the forest live here. I want to ingest their verdant settlements until they carpet my cavities and convert my raptorial self into its own ecosystem,…

JEAN-BAPTISTE DEL AMO TRANSLATED BY FRANK WYNNE Grove Atlantic, 2019. $27, 384 pages. MANY CHARACTERS populate Del Amo’s arresting saga of the toll taken by incest, autism, Catholic shame, and war on four generations of pig farmers, but the main character is the muddy, rot-infested, slurry-soaked landscape surrounding Puy-Larroque in southwest France. The book churns with intense sensory descriptions of the smells and sights that signal death and birth and endure through the decades. Del Amo’s fecund prose reads at times like Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest on acid, an everyday pastoral despair turned into a nightmare of naturalism. The characters are haunted by the stink of pigs. It comes to them in dreams and emanates from their own pores, “a stench that rises from buried worlds as…

ESMÉ WEIJUN WANG Graywolf Press, 2019. $16, 224 pages. GO AHEAD and admit you are frightened of schizophrenia. That you’re not alone. “Craziness scares us,” declares Esmé Weijun Wang in the opening of The Collected Schizophrenias as she describes our common dread of mental illness and its attendant disorder and unhappiness. Right away, our fear of psychosis is understood, even absolved. However, just a moment later, the essay’s collective voice shifts as Wang explains “we deteriorate in a way that is painful for others,” and suddenly what we were afraid of is what we have become. This disorienting reversal in perspective leaves readers navigating with uncertain allegiance, as Wang herself does throughout these harrowing essays that document her struggles with schizoaffective disorder. Originally and incorrectly diagnosed with bipolar disorder the…

FROM OUR READERS LIKE A responsible parent, Joe Wilkins, in his lyric “On Edges” (Summer 2019), refrains from scary words like “climate emergency” and “global crisis.” But when Wilkins and his wife, Liz, leave their tired children during a hike, continuing uphill and out of sight, the allegory is undeniable. How will Edie and Walter’s generation rise to meet the planetary horrors we hand them? Eventually Wilkins turns back toward the children. He needn’t. To see Walter and Edie self-revived, stick-wielding, and stomping after their brush with exhaustion is to catch a shard of hope. If there remains value in taking kids to the woods, in letting them “begin to know their limits and so create themselves,” it can be measured in how they come back swinging to a fractured…

IN A WASH south of Phoenix, I found a crescent moon in the sand, part of a Glycymeris shell carved and polished into a bracelet. This kind of artifact had been worn on the arms of women who lived on hilltop villages and brought their finery out for ceremonies and ball games held in an ancestral city. The artifact was broken in half and worn down, smoothed by the wash that carried it toward the distant and dry Gila River. The desert returns to the sea, and the sea comes back. A shell arrived long ago, deep in the desert, and the gravity of the wash is trying to return it. Dunes blow across barren slopes from a dried river in Mexico. Seashells winnow out of the sand a long…

CHRIS WARE is the author of the graphic novels Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, which received the Guardian First Book Award and was listed among the hundred best books of the decade by the Times (London) in 2009; and Building Stories, which collects its strands as fourteen individual publications in an oversize box. He has appeared on This American Life and has collaborated with Ira Glass on animations for various live shows; created dozens of covers for The New Yorker, some interactive; guest-edited a comics anthology for McSweeney’s and an early volume of Best American Comics; and created serialized graphic stories for the New York Times Magazine and the Guardian. His most recent graphic novel, Rusty Brown (Pantheon, September 2019), was over sixteen years in the making. Its…

MA JIAN Counterpoint, 2019. $23.00, 176 pages. RELEASED to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, Ma Jian’s China Dream is a razor-sharp indictment and fully loaded analysis of China’s recent history and the future to which it may be headed: the centralized control of people’s lives via technology. The novel is centered on Director Ma Daode, who is in charge of the newly created China Dream Bureau. His mission is to replace individual dreams during sleep with a unified and constructed dream for all. The Bureau’s dream is “not the selfish, individualist dream chased by Western countries. It is a dream of the people, a dream of the whole nation, united as one and gathered together into an invincible force.” This dream is on the tips…

1 Arithmetic. Children learn early to call chaos to order, to safety-pin themselves to the cloth of the cosmos. I watch my two-year-old son, Max, develop this survival skill in curious ways. On the airplane leaving the Marshall Islands, he is enthralled by a calculator, his comfort toy as we move to our next diplomatic assignment. He’s pressing Enter over and over, but he’s quiet and I can sleep. In an empty apartment in Montreal, my husband and I listen in shock as our son cheerfully recites the powers of two up to 2^27 — from 2, 4, 8, 16, up to 134,217,728. The same quiet power of two assembles the 2^44 cells of newborns. Max cries when his calculator breaks. 2 Area. Incrementing by one on his new calculator,…