Two Poems
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Holding Up the Sky
Rod Mason & Charles Massy
‘Fire, wind, rain. We’re gonna meet all them three one day, all together, fire, wind and rain, all together one day very soon if we don’t do something about what’s happened and happening.’
Third Eclogue of the Vegetable Garden
John Kinsella
‘What you don’t know set / against all you want to know’
Symbiotic Rootscapes
Merlin Sheldrake
‘Symbiosis – the intimate association formed between different species – is a fundamental feature of life and enables new biological possibilities. Mycorrhizal fungi are some of the more striking examples.’
Water Is Never Lonely
Judith D. Schwartz
‘This water isn’t irredeemably lost, after all. It has merely been waiting for companionship.’
Survivors
Adam Weymouth
‘Salmon are the ultimate survivor. They’ve survived ice ages and cataclysms. But are they going to survive humans? It’s dubious, isn’t it?’
Creep
Caoilinn Hughes
‘She hadn’t been skiing since her master’s in Iceland, back when glaciers had some heft to them, though slackened and fast-diminishing as the legs of a retired cyclist.’
The Secret Loves of Flowers
Dino J. Martins
‘The flirtations of insects and plants are furtive, hidden and often so brief that if you literally blink you might miss what exactly is going on.’
Of the Forest
Manari Ushigua & Zoë Tryon
‘We Indigenous peoples know how nature works, how water, mountains, trees function and relate to each other, how stars in space are connected with the earth.’
Vultures
Samanth Subramanian
‘The death of the vulture is also the death of how we cope with death itself.’
Oh Latitudo
Amy Leach
‘The supervolcano has a supersecret underneath the surface, magma and hot mushy crystals.’
The Wolf at the Door
Cal Flyn
‘Wolves brook no bureaucracy. They do not believe in borders. It has been years since we have come face to face with apex predators in our own country.’
Prepare to Be Kind
Rebecca Priestley
‘Looking forward to 2100, it’s a choice between another thirty centimetres of sea level rise if we do everything we can to cut our carbon emissions, and up to two metres of sea level rise if we don’t.’
The Dragon’s Den
Tim Flannery
‘Just imagine the Australian inland with herds of rhino-sized diprotodon, as well as other gigantic marsupials, being preyed on by marsupial lions and Komodo dragons.’
The Possibility of an Emperor
Patrick Barkham
‘I had always been told that the purple emperor was rare because old woods were rare.’
Aliens and Us
Ken Thompson
‘Japanese knotweed is a terrific late-season source of nectar for both bees and hoverflies, but that’s not much of a headline, is it?’
The High House
Jessie Greengrass
‘All those who might have lived instead of us are gone, or they are starving, while we stay on here at the high house, pulling potatoes from soft earth.’
Upirngasaq (Arctic Spring)
Sheila Watt-Cloutier
‘Everyone benefits from a frozen Arctic. The future of the Arctic environment, and the Inuit it supports, is inextricably tied to the future of the planet.’
Faith
Sayaka Murata
‘Hey, Nagaoka, wanna start a new cult with me?’
New fiction by Sayaka Murata, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori.
Kōbō Abe
Thomas McMullan
‘Against the immensity of things, look at what you can grasp, he seems to say. Grasp it tightly.’
Thomas McMullan on the writing of Kōbō Abe.
Pretty Polly
Shinichi Hoshi
‘Compared to all of you, I’m not the handsomest guy or the smartest, which might’ve caused me all sorts of grief if I was a landlubber. But I spent my life at sea, so I got by.’
Paris Desert, Tokyo Mirage
Hitomi Kanehara
‘What I thought was the world yesterday, today I couldn’t even touch its outline.’
Two essays by Hitomi Kanehara.
Podcast | Joanna Kavenna
Joanna Kavenna
‘We all now exist as avatars, on shining tiles in these cubist landscapes’
Joanna Kavenna discusses her all-too-familiar surveillance dystopia, Zed.
One Hundred Years and a Day
Tomoka Shibasaki
‘After a while people’s faces began to fade, and they came to seem like hoards of noppera-bō, faceless spirits gliding by.’
Two stories by Tomoka Shibasaki.
Cheating
Ahmet Altan
‘I get into the police car with four officers from the Anti-Terrorism Branch. They are taking me to the prison.’
Shame
Mieko Kawakami
‘During sex, Narumi would picture herself as steamed rice being turned into mochi rice cakes.’
North Winds Blow the Leaves From the Trees
Yu Miri
‘I liked her quiet regard, the way it gave me a sense of loneliness.’
Nightingale
Marina Kemp
‘She knew it was a trick of the lonely to favour the rude to the simply unmoved; that the loneliest thing in these villages and in this most tucked-away of professions was to elicit no response at all.’
Marina Kemp’s debut novel Nightingale is shortlisted for the 2020 Young Writer of the Year Award.
