Table of contents for Summer 2020 in Orion

THIS ISSUE of Orion marks the departure of H. Emerson Blake, under whose editorial leadership the magazine has operated for the better part of its history. To characterize our time with Chip (as many of us know him) as a period of growth would be an understatement. His influence extends to Orion’s core assumptions about what it means to write about nature, supporting a legacy of discourse from thought leaders and cultural icons on how to engage more deeply with the world. With Chip’s guidance, the magazine built a presence online, created the Orion Book Award, set and broke many standards for environmental writing, and established workshops to nurture the next generation of authors. And since Chip’s appointment as executive director in 2005, Orion has followed him into what always…

WHEN I ARRIVE in Wyoming, it’s green. High plains at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains. Hills, a rocky summit knife-flat, but wreathed like a crown. For two years, I’ve been traveling to places I’ve never been before, where I know no one. Trying to understand what home is, where it is. Is home the place you left, or the place you are now? I’ve been invited to spend June at an artists’ residency on a peaceful twenty-thousand-acre cattle ranch in the majestic, wide-open setting of northeastern Wyoming. I want to hike, but talk of bears, lightning strikes, and rattlesnakes scares me off. Ruthie, the program director, drives me through roads of winding hills, hand out the window, blue tattoo at her wrist. She says, all this used to be…

BRITISH COLUMBIA is burning, like so much of the West—and like so much of the West, Seattle is smoky, streets dim and Victorian, mountains hazy, particulate levels exceedingly high. Particulates: the particular bits of burning things, the things burning being the Northwest’s forests, the forests and their beings. Which are first of all trees: snags, sprouts, saplings, old growth, mono-culture third-growth firs. And spruce needles, bigleaf maple twigs, alder catkins, yellowing green cottonwood leaves, hemlock heartwood, root tannins of yellow cedar, pitchy upright alpine fir cones, resin blisters of western white pine, the hands-breadth bark of old Douglas firs. And farther east, the puzzle pieces flaking off ponderosa pines impervious to fire to a point—and then past that point ponderosa needles, branches, limbs. And smoke is the claw marks in…

The beach is noiseless,stretching behind my father’s house,a mile of stones and driftwood for those herons, ghostlike,carefully picking their waydown the shoreline, all knees and neck,looking for crabs or somethingthey lost in the surf, and my father points at them and says their nameslike he is making a wish.Then they are all gone and it’s just me and the seagulls hover overheadsaying their own names,the sky making those sounds airplanes make when the worldhas nothing left to say to you. I have no memory of any wishof mine coming true, no knowledgeof how a man turns to another manand promises never to leave him, but the other day I named the shadowof a cardinal through a frosty window for my son, described it so he wouldknow it when he sees…

With no metaphors for what turns and turns, for whatmeets the ground from clouds, I collapse in the roommy barn-blue, silicone funnel. My students, as unruffledas the spectators who they say will idle on the highway while the sky rotates earthward, go round the rowswith advice. I’ll survive fine in this new city without shelterunderground, they soothe. Get a weather radio, get yourselfa helmet. I jot their notes verbatim so when I later walkmy beagle along the bend and glimpse—held motionlessin the reflection—a formation shaped like a beaver’s tailin the water, I don’t startle, but look up to where he pulls:at the egret, the scissortail, the range above us—swallowed!…

Other Press, 2020. $17.99, 432 pages. FIRST PUBLISHED in France in 2018, the year of the gilets jaunes protests, Mathieu’s Prix Goncourt–winning novel captures the restless energy of dejected teenage boys growing up in an industrial valley in the Great East region of France over four summers in the 1990s, where the ruins of blast furnaces from the defunct Metalor firm serve as landmarks as well as daily reminders of their fathers’ lost working-class glory and the racial tension codified by the plants’ nativist pecking order. Opening with a section titled “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Mathieu follows a fourteen-year-old boy named Anthony and his older cousin on a quest to visit a nude beach on the other side of a nearby lake in fictional Heillange. They steal a canoe from…

Tina Chang is Brooklyn’s poet laureate and author of Hybrida. She directs the creative writing department at Binghamton University. Su Cho’s poems can be found in Poetry, New England Review, and elsewhere. She resides in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she serves as editor-in-chief of Cream City Review. Allen Crawford’s work includes Whitman Illumi nated, an illustrated and hand-lettered edition of “Song of Myself.” Kwame Dawes’s most recent collection of poems, Nebraska, was published in 2019 by the University of Nebraska Press. Toni Demuro is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Sassari, Italy, and works in the fields of visual arts and design. Stuart Dybek is the author of three books of fiction: I Sailed with Magellan, The Coast of Chicago, and Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. Anuar Patjane Floriuk…

AS I SWERVE OFF the exit toward the Grand Canyon corridor on AZ-64, I talk with my wife, who has called me from home, on the hands-free. We debate which would be worse: missing the birth of our firstborn or contracting the plague. “Both could happen,” she says through Braxton-Hicks contractions. The call drops. I pass Grand Canyon Junction, Joe’s Route 66 Hot Dogs, and the gates to Big “D” Ranch. Just before Red Lake Valley is Espee Road. The range is dew-dropped, tangy with manure. I cross a cattle guard at 27.8 miles. Before opening the gate, I stuff my pants into my socks. Like the long-sleeve shirt and bug spray, this protects my skin from fleas. I shared this description with my wife days before: “Bacteria are spread…

MY FATHER has collected the most substantial body of fish-based Index of Biotic Integrity data for a watershed of its size anywhere in the world. This is an accomplishment he can claim. Though there are too many dull, qualifying words inserted between those superlatives — or at least that’s what I think. He conducts his study in one North Carolina county (the county that’s our home). Every summer, he returns to the same sites he’s visited for decades. He sinks an electroshocker’s probes into the streams and nets the dozens of fish that float from the bottom, stunned. But I want to describe this as spectacularly as the real thing. He conjures metallic, alchemical slivers. Their upturned bellies flash, surprising—the white of revelation. He names black redhorse, golden redhorse, redbreast…

My heart was attached to the firewood.It was wrapped first in kindle, thread, rosemary,then burned as tinder. I asked myself how I had livedracing toward an end that would always end in fire. As the bundle burned, one would thinkthe listener held matches, one would thinkthey would laugh pointing to the roaring flame.But it was really the night sky watching mercifully with stars gathered on its shoulders.Our ancestors believed in one true burning,watching us as light separates into filaments,and all of us living, witnessing sparks in the sky.…

WHEN I WAS six or seven, I dug a deep hole into the snowdrift in my grandma’s front yard. Bundled up in a too-small navy snowsuit that pinched my crotch, I was out there alone, and that’s the way I liked it. I could make up stories. I could say swear words. Shit, shit, shit, I chanted as I dug, daring one of the adults inside to hear me. I dug and dug with small mittened hands. I dug from the top down, two-handed, flinging snow behind me like a dog in sand. I dug because I was weird and my sisters hated me and the sun was out. I dug because I had nothing else to do on a Sunday in February but disappear into a silent, white hole.…

We grasped those pink plumestethered by bamboo. Our fans opened wide with a flick,obscured everything we wanted. A gaggle of delicate-footed girlshuddled together, transformed into a trembling lotus, eager butterflies,and shapes we’ve never seen. All we did was open ourselveslike peonies reaching for light. Our fluttering hid our parents’ facesin the crowd. Their pure girls on stage, hanbok skirting the floor,a twirl, sliver of white sock, white shoe, a wave of seafoamrolling against a lifeless beach.…

W. W. Norton & Company, 2019. $27.95, 416 pages. “WHAT IS THE NATURE of history when nature is a part of what makes history?” To answer this question, environmental historian Bathsheba Demuth explores the nineteenth- and twentieth-century interplay of ideology and ecology in Beringia, the Arctic region spanning modern-day Russia and America. Demuth left the Midwest to work as an apprentice to a Gwich’in sled dog musher. Here, above the Arctic Circle on the Canadian–Alaskan border, daily life eviscerated Demuth’s idea of a static natural world separate from humankind. Now a participant in the energy conversions of a landscape constantly fluctuating between scarcity and surplus—of temperature, light, and resources—Demuth began to wonder: how is power exchanged between humans and the inhabited landscapes that support them, and what transformations occur in…

Written and illustrated by joe sacco Metropolitan Books, 2020. $29.99, 272 pages. Artist and journalist Joe Sacco travels to the Northwest Territories and investigates a human conundrum in the Dene community: what are they willing to sacrifice to sustain themselves? Fracking, forced separation of aboriginal children from their families, mining for diamonds and oil, alcohol, debt, and the freight of those wounds serve to cripple the landscape and the people who live on it. Deeply observed and masterfully drawn, Sacco (John McPhee–like, always in the background) brings light to dark corners of the world and to the human condition.…

KRISTA TIPPETT (“On Hope,” Spring 2020) beautifully expresses the two-sided coin of hope and despair. I wake up hoping every day that we are in the age of a tectonic shift, and try to use a historian’s perspective to remember that we are only a few dozen years out from the first photo of Earth from space. I reread Archibald MacLeish’s reflection published on December 25, 1968, in the New York Times over and over and over again: The medieval notion of the earth put man at the center of every-thing. The nuclear notion of the earth put him nowhere — beyond the range of reason even — lost in absurdity and war. This lat-est notion may have other conse-quences.… To see the earth as it truly is, small and…

SOUTH CAROLINA LOWCOUNTRY. The porpoise came up out of the May River, due north of Bull Island, where Barataria Creek dumps into the main channel. I was buzzing down-tide in a big skiff, one-fifty Yamaha, twenty-two knots. A hundred yards out, the porpoise rose half out of the water, cocked his head, and gave me that grin and that eye. If you know porpoises, you’ll know what I mean. I swung the wheel to port. He slipped beneath the water and rose again before me, to starboard this time, and he did the same to port, just twenty yards away. I throttled down, and he circled the boat, dove at the prop, inches from whirling death, feigning suicide if I did not shift to neutral. I did. He circled the…

It seems not even a pandemic can cancel paradise.I fill my car at the gas station, then pick upmy daugher’s Montelukast pills and asthmainhaler at the pharmacy. I sanitize my hands afterevery errand. When I return home, my wife and daughterare playing dress-up. CNN echoing on the television(“250,000 cases worldwide”). I put away the groceriesin the pantry and fridge (“10,000 deaths”). Freezeenough meat to last a month (“bats and pangolinsbutchered”). Disinfect handles and doorknobs (“habitats destroyed”). My mom calls. Sore throat— “Just allergies,” she reassures. “It’s cold in Sunnyvale.” I ask about grandma, who’s 92 years old, dementia. “Her care home is quarantined,” she answers. “If she dies, we aren’t allowed to have a funeral service.” Why is grieving not deemed our most essential business? My daughter falls asleep on…

Blindfolded, without sky- or landmark, no lightning-struck fir flagging the pine break, no particular arkof known stars—Little Dipper, Southern Cross—the body, pressing on, no matterhow piano-wired, how absent of play the mind’s straight-line intention, alwayswill circle; this—not stasis, not that I trusted to rescue—why, lost to the woods, I was foundso near where I began as compass point, as measure of alldirection, though I could recall nothing, not even my own shadowreturned at the clearing, its field of scattered needles, the unstitchedspires of pines, where I or the sun first turned away.…

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. $15, 192 pages. FROZEN between climate crisis and political stasis, our current moment seems too large for any of our usual devices to grasp. Yet in Dictionary of the Undoing, John Freeman — writer, book champion, and editor of Literary Hub and Freeman’s — trusts the most human device of all: language. In twenty-six short essays on words from agitate to zygote, he peels back cliché to expose the fresh surface of meaning, reinvigorating words and the thinking we can do with them. “One of the points of this book,” he writes, “has been to navigate around the rhetorical acts of sabotage, to grab the pump levers of language and turn the lights back on.… Words are what connect us: a shared belief that the…

Red Hen/Boreal Books, 2019 $19.95, 155 pages. “CAN’T JUST GO. Can’t, more to the point, just arrive, land. You must prepare yourself,” writes the poet Elizabeth Bradfield, in Toward Antarctica, a marvelous book of prose, poems, and photographs that document her tenure as a naturalist there. More precisely, the book traces Bradfield’s circumnavigation of a polar place that’s hard to linger in, impossible to inhabit, and whose majesties can be glimpsed in partial ways, no matter what longing they inspire before or after. Bradfield should know: she’s been studying Antarctica for decades and was twice able to work as a guide on boats leading others on ecotourism cruises to see it. She’s forged poems out of her notes from the 2011–12 and 2016–17 seasons. The result weaves between prose, rough…

1 Connect. I am a private person, but my community garden plot allows me to share a bit of myself with passing strangers. For the benefit of riders on the local commuter train line, which overlooks the garden, I plant a showy, dramatic border of flowers: cascading “love lies bleeding” amaranth or tall fairy columns of foxgloves or the papery, heroic “Flanders Fields” poppies. A wanderer might stumble on the makeshift poetry post that displays the Gettysburg Address, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” or a haiku about mosquitoes. Several years ago, a garden neighbor added an old yellow plastic garbage can lid that he had repurposed into an oversize emoji using black duct tape—a smiling face with sunglasses. I knitted a red heart and attached it. We all need more…