Another World by Shae Detar
The eye that illustrates the cover of Shae Detar’s Another World reminds me of a scene from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain where a character who looks like Christ steps naked into the domain of someone called the Alchemist. Like everything else in the film, the moment radiates secret and symbolism. The entryway to the Alchemist’s throne is the mind’s eye. And beyond that threshold, the line between the sacred and profane disappears. Only the psychedelic remains, which
Langour by Donavon Smallwood
I wonder if Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices is read much anymore. It’d be quite a shame if it wasn’t. Few books do as good a job framing the Black experience of “nature” in America, historically. You can guess, I’m sure, what that experience entails: “We,” says Wright, “who were landless upon the land; . . . we, who had had our personalities blasted with two hundred years of slavery and had been turned loose to shift for ourselves—we
v7.2 / Yon Sim’s Wrinkles in Time
“We do not know what things look like . . . We know what things are like. It must be a very limiting thing, this seeing,” says Aunt Beast to young Meg Murray, the protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s classic A Wrinkle in Time. I return to this passage now, after wondering what it is in Yon Sim’s images that makes me so aware of the frailties in my own ways of knowing and seeing, seeing and knowing. Making little
v7.1 / A Crack in the Book of Nature: Al Brydon
“The book of Nature still lies on the table; there is, as always, one crack in it, not easy to be soldered or welded,” writes Ralph Waldo Emerson to his brother in 1836. Emerson’s Nature is a long essay, in the true sense of the word—an attempt to describe not only the physical artistry of the lakes and trees but the source and essence of that artistry, what the poet Dylan Thomas calls the “force that through the
A Journey: The Near Future by Nicolai Howalt
Nicolai Howalt’s A Journey: The Near Future is miles away from his previous book, Old Tjikko—140 million miles away, actually. Howalt’s Journey leaves behind Earth’s ancient spruces and settles on Mars, with its vistas of lithic tuff and desiccation. And the source material for this journey, much of which looks like oddly cropped collages of Yosemite, comes from NASA’s rovers (Opportunity, Spirit, Curiosity, and Perseverance). Few of us probably remember anymore the rover’s predecessor, the Viking 1 lander,