Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

An intrepid, galvanizing meditation on illness, disability, feminism, and what it means to be alive.

In 1995 Alice’s mother collapsed with pneumonia. She never fully recovered and was eventually diagnosed with ME, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Then Alice got ill. Their symptoms mirrored their mother’s and appeared to have no physical cause; they received the same diagnosis a few years later. Ill Feelings blends memoir, medical history, biography and literary nonfiction to uncover both of their case histories, and branches out into the records of ill health that women have written about in diaries and letters.

Their cast of characters includes Virginia Woolf and Alice James, the poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson, John Ruskin’s lost love Rose la Touche, the artist Louise Bourgeois and the nurse Florence Nightingale.

As our treatment of nonhuman animals is increasingly implicated in planetary crises—from climate change to global pandemics to unprecedented rates of biodiversity loss and species extinction—it’s clear that an urgent reconsideration of our relationship to other animals is not only necessary but overdue.

How we write about animals, how we represent them in our poems and stories, doesn’t simply reflect how we relate to them in the world; it also shapes how we treat them. Any cultural shift in how we conceive of other animals requires a shift in how we read and write about them. The New Sentience seeks to help catalyze this shift by ushering in a new kind of animal poetry, what editors Ashley Capps and Allison Titus dub “kinpoetics.” Whereas animals in Western poetry have disproportionately functioned as symbols, the poems in this anthology foreground a meaningful awareness of animal sentience and subjectivity, depicting other animals as individuals with dynamic selfhood, personalities, and emotional lives.

Stylistically wide-ranging, the poets featured here, among them Wendell Berry, Lucille Clifton, E. E. Cummings, Mary Oliver, Ross Gay, and Margaret Atwood, apply scrutinous lyrical attention to the animal experience in such surprising and illuminating ways that the reader can’t avoid an earnest reexamination of what humans owe our more-than-human kin. With humility, empathy, and curiosity, the work in this anthology reaffirms the vital connections between humans, animals, and the natural world. This pioneering book will impel readers to a deeper understanding of the lives of the creatures that share our planet and will inspire poets and writers to a more compassionate, meaningful engagement with animal subjects and lives.

In a reality in which the boundaries between cinema, art, installation and multimedia experimentation seem to be increasingly blurred, History of a Tree by Flatform is a project that sets out to radically alter the idea of the portrait in western art. 

A non-human living organism – the Oak of the Hundred Knights of Tricase, the oldest Vallonea oak in Europe at the age of 900 years – and the territory in which it has stood for centuries become the subject: through a film and a robotized video installation, statements become a portrait, and are transformed into a work of art. 

The book retraces the genesis, development and implementation of this original idea, providing a visual score, the film in 80 images, dialogues in ten languages, the contributions of a tree searcher, an art historian and two philosophers, as well as a series of in-depth essays drawing on the fields of science, history, anthropology, music and linguistics. 

A reissue of the 1982 inaugural Cassandra Radical Feminist Nurses Newsletter: founding members explain their interests, intentions, and goals, and invite other nurses to join them. 

Introductory text by Peggy Chinn, founding member, and also co-author of Peace & Power: A Handbook of Feminist Process.

The Alder & Frankia Efemmera Reissue series amplifies, graphically reinterprets, and shares historic feminist ephemera. What ideas, strategies, and tactics from the past can we inherit to bring forth a feminist future? 

Elizabeth Povinelli's anthropology of the otherwise locates itself within forms of life that run counter to dominant modes of being under late settler liberalism. In these essays, she considers the emergence of new worlds and the extinguishment of old ones, seeking to develop a social imaginary that can sustain radical potentiality without turning a blind eye to our deep interdependence.