Frothy Elegance & Loose Concupiscence
Karen Hays
Four Poems
Aditi Machado
After After Nature
Ann Lauterbach
Eight Poems
Thomas Bernhard and Translated by James Reidel
Last Days Feeding Frenzy
Russell Banks
Transformation Day
Lucy Ives
Two Poems
Martine Bellen
Brother Who Comes Back Before the Next Very Big Winter
Benjamin Hale
Fishmaker
Evelyn Hampton
Visiting Nanjing
Margaret Ross
And the Bow Shall Be in the Cloud
Michael Ives
Big Burnt
Joyce Carol Oates
Return to Monsterland
Sequoia Nagamatsu
Ventifacts
Christine Hume
The Dead Swan
Lily Tuck
The Confession of Philippe Delambre
Greg Hrbek
From Experimental Animals, A Reality Fiction
Thalia Field
Wara Wara
Diana George
Green Eyes of Harar
Wil Weitzel
Anemochore
Meredith Stricker
Five Poems
Jessica Reed
The Face Says Do Not Kill Me
Miranda Mellis
After the Jump
Matthew Pitt
Fire Feather Mendicant Broom
Noy Holland
From Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners
Sarah Mangold
Proof of the Monsters
Matthew Baker
Listen the Birds, A Trailer
China Miéville
Four Poems
Aditi Machado
Gaps in Knowledge, by Carolyn Guinzio, 2014. Digital photographic collage. © Carolyn Guinzio 2015; all rights reserved by the artist.
In smog-choked Nanjing with its vegetable vendors and on an island encircled by the pristine waters of Lake George and haunted by a doomed man’s memories, nature generates its own narratives in which humans play out their ordinary lives and, sometimes, extraordinary deaths. In the ancient city of Harar in eastern Ethiopia where hyenas come to feed in the sultry night and in the snowy Alaskan wilderness whose Russian River salmon are being greedily, hedonistically overfished, nature is observed, marveled at, even as it’s being exploited and threatened—together with its hapless human “custodians”—with extinction. Nature survives as best it can while we savor and pollute it, celebrate and misuse it. And as for its misuse, humans have long been an egregiously clever tribe of misusers. If, for instance,the Department of Defense has its way, as Christine Hume notes in these pages, weather itself could one day be weaponized using “weather-modification technologies [that] might give the United States a ‘weather edge’ over adversaries.”
Yet not all is apocalyptic. Nature has traditionally played a rich, central role in literature, sometimes becoming a character itself. Yes, a dead swan becomes a metaphor for a dying, violent marriage, but then springtime flora proposes rebirth, the promise of futurity. In these pages we encounter shrimp farms and spoonbills, maize husks and Austrian woods, tarantulas and eels, multitudinous winds that pollinate or desiccate—nature in all its myriad forms, right down to photons, neutrons, neutrinos, and, yes, even Godzilla, the Sasquatch, and other of nature’s fictive and folkloric monsters.
Natural Causes is less a dispatch from the Sierra Club—although concern for our environment and appreciation of its ravishing beauty and diversity are very much on the minds of these writers—than a reimagining of how nature writing can be written. Here are twenty-five engagements not only with our natural world but with the ways in which we contemplate it in art and essay.
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