An amateur botanist gets intimate with the plants of the Blue Ridge—ailanthus, stickweed, kudzu—and reconsiders Western science’s taxonomy of leafy criminals and citizens.
In conversation with Robert Frost, Gaston Bachelard, and a sound machine, a poet / essayist charts a path through her local greenbelt to map memory and impermanence.
After her cancer diagnosis, a doctor becomes her own textbook, examining genetic anomalies, hidden honeybees, and what she, her sister, and her family carry.
A mother and her daughter look closely at their home place, recording what true things they can about the Haw River, frogs, protest, and pollution in the age of climate crisis.
In contrast to the Old Testament, which blamed the pain of childbirth on sin, evolutionary biologists in the late twentieth century proposed the obstetrical dilemma.