Nonfiction

With the aid of a painting by J. Jay McVicker, an Oklahoma outsider considers historic curios, queerness, red politics, and scissortail flycatchers.

Contemplating public sculptures, a citizen examines the relationships between American exceptionalism and shame, historic massacres and meme culture.

A traveling scholar looks to wasps, jaguars, coyotes, bobcats, and owls for a sense of wild recognition, contemplating the mixed consequences of how nature observes itself.

In her first postpartum weeks, a writer sheds embarrassment while becoming acquainted with her body’s new demands, leaning into a newly discovered liberation.

A forager gathers chokeberries, cemetery apples, and bayberries, and speculates on other possible worlds, in this autumnal triptych.

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.