Orion Magazine

IN SEPTEMBER, Orion and the Yale School of the Environment cohosted a live online conversation between Robin Wall Kimmerer, Robert Macfarlane, David Haskell, and Mary Evelyn Tucker celebrating the release of Old Growth, our latest anthology of essays

Kerri Arsenault REVIEWS EDITOR Donovan Arthen DIRECTOR OF FINANCE AND OPERATIONS Amy Brady EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Greenlee Brown DATABASE ASSISTANT Tracie Butler-Kurth INDIVIDUAL GIVING COORDINATOR Christopher Cox EDITOR AT LARGE Camille Dungy POET

susanne paola antonetta MY HOMETOWN of Bellingham, Washington, is a last corner of the continental United States, a final chew of land before the long drink of the Pacific. We’re bound to the west by water, to the east by mountain, and twenty miles t

I have murderous thoughts likewhat if the virus should kill us allhiding in my home watchingthe earth thaw and the birdsreturned too early worry up and down the trees Nothing can touch me but songand sun through the windowstill I feel this indoor spr

The sun is an old tire.The sun is a grand piano.The sun is a borrowed mother,a sutured wind, a still spiral air. When you were born, I held you and said:“I am so happy to see you again.” The surprise of a wet leg in the palm of my hand.The heat of a

100. I LIVE MY LIFE IN LINES, a series of graphs, dots, or blips, readings that register the health of my personal landscape. When the line goes up, mucous begins to slather around my mouth. I become groggy, lethargic, concrete blocks strapped to my

That night of apparition snowbecame horses thundering throughheadlights spread beams splaying light bladesuntil they appeared hurdling the roadfull run, over and over again, in some portalskipping time back to range unbrokenunfenced. From backroads c

What they don’t say is that, sometimes God will call you to the wilderness, gesture toward the trees, and then, hang back and wave you on alone. —“Prayer for the Wretched Among Us” from The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded At nig

Paint over creases in the paper, in the archive, swish that color right into the edges till we shine, you and I, we shine, bodies submerged emerge in the beaten still white page, skirt watery dispersion to assemble, molecule by molecule, toward a rea

Odilon Redon, The Egg, 1885. lithograph in black on ivory china paper laid down on ivory wove paper, 17.25 × 12.36 inches (sheet), art institute chicago PICTURE ME: seven years old, curled shell-like around a book, oblivious to anything beyond the bo

FSG Originals Norwegian writer and academic Jan Grue excavates “what lies beneath” the human body when the body is a body that nondisabled people tend to avoid, ignore, or erase; and how does his body, in particular, fit into a world not made by or f

New York Review Books ON THE FIRST DAY, a storm is born. A whorl in southeast Japan. Her name is Maria. For twelve days (each day a chapter), we follow Maria’s growth as we would a child; however, her development is more rapid, tumultuous, dangerous.

New Directions MOSQUITOES. One of the world’s most hated and ubiquitous insects. Punishing and sometimes deadly, their sound alone—late at night—can drive you mad. But imagine if you could communicate with them. Bernal’s novel follows an aggrieved dr

Melville House FOR ALL THE WOMEN who write about walking in nature (Wild, The Salt Path, etc.), there is no companion I’d rather have than Katherine May: her graceful, wonderful, funny, sometimes clumsy, and electric (per the title) self. It’s not an

Bloomsbury IF TREES COULD TALK, what would they say? In The Island of Missing Trees, the forbidden love between Kostas (Greek Christian) and Defne (Turkish Muslim) unfolds beneath a fig tree, a tree that also (partly) narrates the book and embodies t

Taylor Brorby is the author of Crude and Coming Alive and coeditor of Fracture. His next book, Boys and Oil, is forthcoming. He teaches environmental studies at Wofford College. Sarah Capdeville worked as a wilderness ranger for five seasons and is a

I’m one of those annoying people who doesn’t really have much of a sweet tooth—except when it comes to the amber sweetness and crumble of maple. You’ll forgive me if I don’t miss much about the brutal winters of western New York, where I lived for fi