Ecology

In Fly-Fishing, Christopher Schaberg ponders his lifetime pursuit of the widely mythologized art of fly-fishing. From the Michigan lakeshore where he learned to fish to casting flies in a New Orleans bayou, Schaberg sketches landscapes and fish habitats and shows how fly-fishing allows him to think about coexisting with other species. It offers Schaberg a much-needed source of humility, social isolation, connection with nature, and a reminder of environmental degradation. Rather than centering fishing on trophies, conquest, and travel, he advocates for a “small-fishing” that values catching the diminutive fish near one’s home. Introspective and personal, Fly-Fishing demonstrates how Schaberg’s obsession indelibly shapes how he understands and lives in the wider world.

Salmon: A Red Herring questions what colours we expect in our "natural" environment. It asks us to examine how our perception of colour is changing as much as we are changing the planet. Adapted into the eponymous Turner Prize-nominated exhibition at Tate Britain, this book launched an international campaign against salmon farming.

In 2018, the artist/activist duo Cooking Sections heard of a sparrow that had turned bright pink on the Isle of Skye. So began an odyssey-like investigation into where it went, who was responsible, and what it signalled about its surrounding ecology. The pair spoke to fishermen in Mexico, where shrimp are turning grey, interviewed beekeepers in Brooklyn, who reported red-coloured honey, and investigated the Nornickel factory in Norilsk, Russia, where blue fog and black snow are industrial byproducts. Their findings are presented as a detective story for the era of environmentalism: a wildly inventive book and an exhibition at Tate Britain.

The book, Salmon: A Red Herring, shows how design can address the fragility of our food systems and how colour configures our economies. It is a visceral and visual examination of aesthetic manipulation, industrial farming, and environmental degradation, a seminal intervention in colour theory. In turn, Cooking Sections—the recently announced winners of the Harvard Wheelwright Prize—use it to launch a new global campaign against fish farming.

As COVID makes visible the fragility of our food systems and the need for an overhaul of environmental regulations, this work is now more relevant than ever. The publishers describe it as "Michael Pollan meets Gilbert and George" and Cooking Sections say it is "intended as a Ways of Seeing for the era of environmental reassessment".

Cooking Sections examines the systems that organise the world through food. Using site-responsive installation, performance and video, they explore the overlapping boundaries between art, architecture, ecology and geopolitics. Established in London in 2013 by Daniel Fernández Pascual (born in 1984) and Alon Schwabe (born in 1984), their practice uses food as a lens and a tool to observe landscapes in transformation.

Forewords by Bruno Latour, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Hannah Landecker, David Zilber.

The most accessible introduction to the life and work of James Lovelock, and a guide to address today's "polycrisis."

There is no creation of the future if we do not sustain, at root, an intuition for invention. No one understood this better than James Lovelock, the most significant scientific thinker since Charles Darwin.

Over the course of his career, Lovelock set the terms by which we've come to understand life—biologically, societally, poetically—in the twenty-first century. He helped NASA complete missions to Mars and the moon; he invented devices that revealed the presence of harmful chemicals in the Earth's atmosphere, inspiring Rachel Carson to write Silent Spring; and he formulated the Gaia hypothesis, the deceptively simple idea that our planet could be viewed as a single self-regulating organism—everything entangled, everything acting upon everything else.

In September 2015, Hans Ulrich Obrist traveled to Dorset to visit Lovelock at his seaside cottage, where they spent nine hours discussing garden cities, frozen hamsters, rising temperatures, tiny widgets, the Space Age, the birth of modern science, the agonies of institutions, and the future of humanity. Ever Gaia presents this conversation as a celebration of Lovelock, who died in 2022 at 103, alongside contributions from two future pioneers of Gaia: Daisy Hildyard and Precious Okoyomon. As another of Lovelock's heirs, Tim Lenton, writes in his afterword, this encounter was pivotal in Lovelock's late intellectual life and, at the start of 2023, provides a guide—by way of Lovelock's Gaian approach—to address today's "polycrisis."

Ever Gaia opens the second season of isolarii as a tribute not just to Lovelock but to the late Bruno Latour, who introduced the series when we launched it two years ago. The second volume of a trilogy that started with the release of The Archipelago Conversations in 2021, Ever Gaia is the most accessible introduction to the life and work of Lovelock, whose way of seeing—"perhaps his greatest legacy," Obrist writes—will continue to shape our world and our place within it for decades to come.

One of artist Jenna Sutela's regular collaborators, Physarum polycephalum, is often referred to as a natural computer. This yellow, ‘many-headed’ slime mold is an ancient, decentralized, autonomous organism that processes data without a nervous system, operating via communities of coordinated nuclei that demonstrate advanced spatial intelligence. If the slime mold cannot find the resources it needs, it hibernates until better conditions arise; theoretically, it is immortal. Over the years, Sutela has, for example, ingested the slime mold in her performances as a form of artificial intelligence, letting its hive-like behavior program her own.

Sutela's work for Samara reactivates this line of work, delivering co-existence with the slime mold to people's homes in the form of a dried sample of Physarum polycephalum as well as related performative instructions. Inside the box, the audience receives everything necessary to grow slime mold at home, and witness the behaviour of this fascinating organism. With the set of performative instructions, Jenna Sutela proposes the ways of co-existing and engaging with Physarum polycephalum.

Jenna Sutela works with words, sounds, and other living media, such as Bacillus subtilis nattō bacteria and the “many-headed” slime mold Physarum polycephalum. Her audiovisual pieces, sculptures, and performances seek to identify and react to precarious social and material moments, often in relation to technology. Sutela's work has been presented at museums and art contexts internationally, including Guggenheim Bilbao, Moderna Museet, and Serpentine Galleries. She is a Visiting Artist at The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) in 2019-21.

Protoplasmic Flow contains everything required to activate the slime mold in a location of your choosing.

Duration: take all the time that you need
Language: Instructions are in English and Italian.

Selected short stories by one of the most acclaimed voices in post-war US American science fiction.

This volume presents a selection of short fiction by Vonda Neel McIntyre (1948–2019), one of the most acclaimed writers of post-war US American science fiction, and the winner of multiple awards for both novels and short fiction.

These stories, which span the whole of McIntyre's career, show the broad range of her interests and her voice, taking us from bleak dystopian worlds on the verge of environmental collapse to baroque intergalactic civilizations populated by genetically modified humans, from cries for freedom to sharp-eyed satire to meditations on aging. Throughout run her distinctive themes of gender and power dynamics, human and species diversity, and a pragmatic utopianism that emphasises our mutual dependency.

The stories included in the volume are: "Breaking Point," "Thanatos," "Shadows, Moving," "Elfleda," "A Story for Eilonwy," "Malheur Maar," "The Adventure of the Field Theorems," "Little Faces", "Little Sisters," and "XYY" (previously unpublished).

Vonda Neel McIntyre (1948–2019) was one of the most acclaimed voices in US American science fiction from the 1960s onwards. A novelist, short story writer, essayist, and critic, she won her first Hugo Award in 1973 for her novella "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand." This formed part of her ground-breaking feminist novel Dreamsnake (1978), which won both the Hugo and the Nebula Award. A later novel, The Moon and the Sun, won the Nebula in 1997. McIntyre contributed extensively to debates within the US sf community over the role of women in science fiction, and was instrumental in founding the Clarion West Writers Workshop for novice sf writers. A final novel, The Curve of the World, was completed shortly before her death.

‘Critical Designers’ produced by an increasing number of design schools are prompted to address social, political and environmental issues through their practices. Yet, who can afford to continue such effort after graduation?

In a dynamic style holding multiple voices, Who Can Afford To Be Critical? discusses the limits that affordability, class and labour impose upon the educational promise of holding a ‘critical’ practice. Why do we tend to ignore the material and socioeconomic constraints that bind us as designers, claiming instead that we can be powerful agents of change? In fact, where does our agency lie?

Instead of focusing on the dream of ethical work under capitalism, could we, instead, focus first on designers’ own working conditions, targeting them as one immediate site for collective action? And can we engage politically with the world not necessarily as designers, but as workers, as activists, as citizens?

Mushrooms hold a peculiar place in our culture: we love them and despise them, fear them and misunderstand them. They can be downright delicious or deadly poisonous, cute as buttons, or utterly grotesque. These strange organisms hold great symbolism in our myths and legends. In this book, Nicholas P. Money tells the utterly fascinating story of mushrooms and the ways we have interacted with these fungi throughout history. Whether they have populated the landscapes of fairytales, lent splendid umami to our dishes, or steered us into deep hallucinations, mushrooms have affected humanity from the earliest beginnings of our species.  
           
As Money explains, mushrooms are not self-contained organisms like animals and plants. Rather, they are the fruiting bodies of large—sometimes extremely large—colonies of mycelial threads that spread underground and permeate rotting vegetation. Because these colonies decompose organic matter, they are of extraordinary ecological value and have a huge effect on the health of the environment. From sustaining plant growth and spinning the carbon cycle to causing hay fever and affecting the weather, mushrooms affect just about everything we do. Money tells the stories of the eccentric pioneers of mycology, delights in culinary powerhouses like porcini and morels, and considers the value of medicinal mushrooms. This book takes us on a tour of the cultural and scientific importance of mushrooms, from the enchanted forests of folklore to the role of these fungi in sustaining life on earth.

What is postnature? How to understand the socio-climatic crisis and where to look for new narratives for a desirable future? What is the relationship between contemporary ecology and artistic practices? The postnatural condition is a speculative glossary of terms and images, of stories and materials, an unfinished archive of intertwined thoughts. This book, which includes theoretical texts, situated examples, and artistic projects, presents a critical view of the modern Western conception of the "natural" and proposes new perspectives and resonances. Mixing affective philosophies, minor anthropologies, critical historical revisions, minimal histories, narratives, and stories on the margins, it seeks to proliferate a kaleidoscopic vision around ecology in an increasingly deteriorating world, inviting us to imagine and propose other worlds to come from respect, empathy, and coexistence.

Texts by Gabriel Alonso & Clara Benito with collaborators: Paloma Villalobo, Valentín Bansac, Nicolás Sánchez, Fionn Duffy, Aitor Frías, Andra Lena, Pop Juri, Geerts Dana, Lorenzo Galgó, Maria Morata, Valeria Mata, Maya Pita-Romero, Lily Chishan Wong, Sina Sohrab, Davide Marcianesi, Preethisakana Mathiseka, Alessandro Pasero, Anna Raffaghello, Ludmila Secchin, Federico Dopazo, Alba Noguera.

A workbook by Flatform on displacement, conceived and curated by Giuliana Prucca.

The book is published under four different covers and with four different layouts, randomly distributed.

Founded in 2006 and based in Berlin and Milan, Flatform is a video and media arts collective, at the border between experimental cinema and contemporary art, that creates time-based works, film events, and installations, most of which revolve around landscape and biopolitics. Distributed by Light Cone in Paris and by Video Data Bank in Chicago, works by Flatform have competed in major film festivals including Cannes, Rotterdam, Venice, Toronto, and have been shown worldwide in art venues such as Centre Pompidou, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Hirshhorn Museum, MAXXI Museum, Eye Filmmuseum, Wexner Center for the Arts and Garage Center for the Arts.

Co-published by Light Cone and Avarie.

Zoo Index Reader examines the relevance and effect that zoos have in shaping our gaze towards non-human animals and by extension ourselves/each other.

Through a mixture of visual research into zoological space—in the form of an A-Z glossary—and written contributions on the history of menageries, the confinement and privatization of land, pets, zoo architecture, the "naturalization" of animals, and the role of zoos and animals in the history of cinema, among many other things, this first volume asks: Do we need zoos? What does a meaningful coexistence with animals look like? Why have we decided to give a balloon to an elephant?

With Terezie Štindlová, jacob lindgren, A+E Collective, Chanelle Adams, John Berger, Andrea Branzi, David Hancocks, Eliot Haworth, Institute for Postnatural Studies, Suzanne van der Lingen, Angelo Renna, Laurel Schwulst, Richard Weller.

Designed by Terezie Štindlová

This publication is the first issue of ‘Spatial Folders’, a thematic periodical that is produced by the faculty of Master Interior Architecture: Research and Design (MIARD) program at Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. It is composed of a selection of graduation theses alongside contributions by guest authors that focus on urgent socio-cultural, socio-political, and ecological issues that affect the (built) environment and its representation regimes.

This first issue focuses on extraction and extractivism that characterises the power structures that make our worlds and their historicities. Across time extraction processes have been making and changing the spaces of the world through displacement of bodies and matter, from within and across the earth. At the same time, these processes establish epistemologies and forms of representation that articulate extraction as natural or inevitable within the frameworks of anthropocentrism, capitalism, colonialism, racism, or hetero-reproductivism.

This collection of texts approaches the question of extraction from a variety of spatial perspectives. The contributions zoom in to specific sites, cases, and areas of interest while providing a critical analysis of various networks of power and influence across time and space. These works do not turn away from the material aspect of extraction but rather closely trace the spatial and material conditions and consequences of extraction in the case of oil, hormones, milk, wood, and water, among others.

With Kris Dittel, Golnar Abbasi, Eva Garibaldi, Shiila Infriccioli, Natasha Marie Llorens, Jane Rendell, Shonali Shetty, Alex Augusto, Suárez Agnes Tatzber, Elien Vermoortel, Dominique Willis, Clementine Edwards, Zoraïma Hupkes

Design by Dongyoung Lee

This experimental children’s book narrates cross-species practices of survival across the Indonesian archipelago, centring the perspectives of local animals such as endangered monkeys, cosmopolitan rats, migrant sparrows and fugitive dogs. Written in the form of a play, its six episodes ground the readers in the animals’ struggles and aspirations as they go about their daily lives and face the consequences of postcolonial erasure, ecological destruction and capitalist expansion. While the stories unfold, their interconnected existences become an archive of uncertainties, where the fate of many different creatures, humans included, is inseparable from each other.

As a script for intergenerational transmission, the book thoughtfully combines dialogues, songs and drawings, with contextualising essays and extensive notations. Through these different modes of reading, children and adults alike will learn about cross-species solidarity and rebellious movements, but also about disappearing Indigenous cosmologies, and the brave women who wove cloths around the mountains in eco-political resistance.

Robida is a situated, multilingual cultural magazine published by Robida collective. Each issue explores a topic connected and generated by Topolò/Topolove, the village on the border between Italy and Slovenia where the collective is based.

The chosen topic is thrown into the world and interpreted by people who have never been to Topolò. What people send back after the open call is not only a contribution to the exploration of a defined theme but also a new interpretational tool to explore the collective’s relation to Topolò.

The ninth issue of Robida magazine digs into soil, dirt, mud, earth, ground and compost, which are interpreted through six categories, each proposed by one editor of the magazine: symbolic, feminist, theoretical, dwelling, contaminated and tactile soils.

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CONTRIBUTORS
Adriana Gallo, Alecio Ferrari, Aljaž Škrlep, Anaïs Tondeur, Angela Serino, Anna Lina Litz, antonisotzu, Antônio Frederico Lasalvia, Beatrice Zerbato, Benedetta Ciappini, Chiara Alexandra Young, Chiara Caredda, Diego García, Donatella Livigni, Dora Ciccone, Eduardo Makoszay Mayén, Eleanor White, Elena Ferrari, Elena Rucli, Emily Priest, Emmanuel Álvarez Sánchez , FAHR 021.3, Federico Bardelli, Federico Broggini, Francesca Lucchitta, Georgina Pantazopoulou, Germain Meulemans, Gijs de Boer, Giorgia Maurovich, Giulia Pompilj, Greta Biondi, Hannah Segerkrantz, How Melnyczuk, Jack Bardwell, Janja Šušnjar, jean ni, Laura Savina, Luca Scandurra, Lucia Fontanelli, Marianna Maruyama, Margherita Issori, masharu, Michael Marder, Naomi Oke, Ola Korbańska, Petra Filagrana, René Nissen, Rūta Žemčugovaitė, Silvia Marchese, Sofia Salvatori, Sasha van Aalst, Stefan Breit, Steffie de Gaetano, Stephanie Newcomb, Tina Alise Drupa, Toni Wagner, Tymon Hogenelst, Vida Rucli, Vittoria Rubini, Yiannis I. Andronikidis, Yvonne Billimore, Zuzanna Skurka.

Tourism does more than transforming spaces and forcing emotions: its geographies also conceal a persisting power that captures the imagination. In their operational sturdiness, tourismscapes appear intractable and inert, making their alternative renderings almost unthinkable. It feels uncanny to picture islands and their coasts freed from programs of leisure. But in recent years, the exhaustion of people and landscapes has brought forth a renewed imperative to think outside this ubiquitous extractive industry. Through essays, pieces of fiction, and visual references, this book discusses both the difficulty and the necessity of disrupting the monocultural imaginations of tourism. To escape the devouring vortex of its sticky nature and messianic promises, the cultural and political work necessary is not only this of negation and resistance, but also that of bold re-conceptualizations and re-imaginings.

The Posthumanist is a bi-annual English and German magazine featuring art, design, technology and writing. Each issue presents one theme from various more-than-human perspectives, inviting readers to imagine what living together on planet earth is and could be.

The Posthumanist is a bi-annual English and German magazine featuring art, design, technology and writing. Each issue presents one theme from various more-than-human perspectives, inviting readers to imagine what living together on planet earth is and could be. 

The idea for the publication emerged from a desire to discuss concepts and expressions of critical posthumanism and feminist new materialism in public contexts and to explore what inclusive futures could feel like. 

Chronicling an epic multimedia project 10 years in the making, A.K. Burns' first monograph grapples with climate change, community and sociopolitical agency

Deploying science fiction, material feminism, eco-anarchism, queer theory and technoscience, New York-based artist A.K. Burns (born 1975) explores the fraught relationships between humanity and nature in an epic multimedia work, Negative Space (2015-23). This nonlinear allegory provokes questions about marginalized bodies, environmental fragility and technology. Developed as a cycle of four video installations, Negative Space imagines new relationships to the spaces we occupy and the impact of our bodies in these spaces through imagery, research and critical and creative writings. Set in a speculative present, the tetralogy envisions a new materialist cosmology wherein hierarchical relations are transformed.

Edited by Karen Kelly and Barbara Schroeder
Text by CA Conrad, Mel Y. Chen, Aruna D’Souza, Megan Hicks, Simone White, and a conversation between the artist and Karen Archey

The current ecological crisis brings about a new relational landscape: an unprecedented collapse of distances creates interspecies promiscuities and a crisis of the human scale. In Inclusions, Nicolas Bourriaud proposes that artists are the anthropologists of this new era.

"Today, the ecological catastrophe challenges us to rethink the space our societies have assigned to art. Creativity, critical thinking, exchange, transcendence, the relationship to the Other and to History are values intrinsic to artistic practice that will soon be of vital importance for the future of mankind. We need art to give a meaning to our lives, and the banks will not supply that. By attempting to unfold a few of the aesthetic figures floating in the global imaginary, this book intends to describe what is at stake in artistic activity in the age of the Capitalocene and to argue for it as a vital need."

Nicolas Bourriaud (born 1965) is a French curator, theoritian and writer.

There is a growing interest in fungi and mycelium as a material, the ever-branching connecting threads of the fungal world. The entanglements and how this rhizomatic network functions is not just a fascinating ecological system and material, but carries a profound usefulness as a metaphor for our potential new systems, ways of thinking and behaviors.

Let’s Become Fungal! takes its inspiration from the world of art and mycology and shares innovative practices from Latin America and the Caribbean that are rooted in multispecies collaboration, symbiosis, alliances, non-monetary resource exchange, decentralization, bottom-up methods and mutual dependency­—all in line with the behavior of the mycelium.

Every chapter is phrased as a question. They do not lead to answers, but to twelve teachings addressing for instance collaboration, decoloniality, non-linearity, toxicity, mobilization, biomimicry, death, and being non-binary. Simultaneously it ventures deeper into the world of fungi. The teachings from the fungus may inspire artists, collectives, organizations, educators, policy-makers, designers, scientists, anthropologists, change-makers, curators, urbanists, activists, gardeners, community-leaders, farmers, and many others, to become more fungal in their ways of working and being.

Inspired by conversations with: Francisca Álvarez Sánchez, Carolina Caycedo, Annalee Davis, Maya Errázuriz, Juan Ferrer, Lilian Fraiji, Giuliana Furci, Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Yina Jiménez Suriel, Patricia Kaishian, Mirla Klijn and Olaf Boswijk, Lola Malavasi and Daniela Morales Lisac, Martina Manterola and Carmen Serra, Camila Marambio, Mariana Martínez Balvanera, Claudia Martínez Garay, Lina Meija and Luciana Fleischman, Tomaz Morgado Françozo and Marília Carneiro Brandão, Marion Neumann, Maria Alice Neves, Tara Rodríguez Besosa, Raquel Rosenberg, Juli Simon, Ela Spalding, Gianine Tabja, Gabriela Flores del Pozo and Lucia Monge, Fer Walüng, Tatyana Zambrano.

Sensing Earth states that our environmental issues are in the first place a matter of culture and aesthetics. Technology and science are not enough to solve these problems.

Our globe is facing an escalation of ecological problems, with no quick solutions in sight. We seem to be caught in a spiral of health issues, burnout, sensory overload, depression, and somatic deprivation. Artists faced with these crises are looking for ways to articulate the ongoing emergencies and explore possible ways out. However, the arts and culture are caught in a double bind. Artists and cultural initiatives need circulation to let ideas intersect and create meaningful connections. However, this globalized system also contributes to the planet’s ecological decline: by countless journeys from one biennale, international residency, touring exhibition and networking event to the next. After the Covid-19 pandemic ‘business as usual’ seems to prevail.

Sensing Earth includes essays, interviews, poetry, manifestos, choreographic prompts, speculative fiction, and case studies operating at the intersection of art and activism, culture and nature. All texts explore what sensorial foundations are necessary to address systemic failures, and what routes to take for keeping us moving on this planet, physically, emotionally and intellectually.

Contributors: Grégory Castéra, Center for Arts, Design and Social Research (Dalída Maria Benfield, Christopher Bratton, Luigi Coppola, Pelin Tan), Philipp Dietachmair, Futurefarmers, Pascal Gielen, Marina Guzzo, INLAND (Fernando García-Dory), Meander, Georgia Nicolau, Luciane Ramos Silva, Noel B. Salazar, Joy Mariama Smith, Naine Terena de Jesus, Dea Vidović, André Wilkens, Ana Žuvela

As human-induced environmental change threatens multispecies livability, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet puts forward a bold proposal: entangled histories, situated narratives, and thick descriptions offer urgent “arts of living.” Included are essays by scholars in anthropology, ecology, science studies, art, literature, and bioinformatics who posit critical and creative tools for collaborative survival in a more-than-human Anthropocene. 

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Niels Bohr Professor at Aarhus University in Denmark, where she codirects Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA).

Heather Swanson is assistant professor of anthropology at Aarhus University.

Elaine Gan is art director of AURA and postdoctoral fellow at Aarhus University.

Nils Bubandt is professor of anthropology at Aarhus University, where he codirects AURA.

In the 1970s, microbiologist Lynn Margulis and atmospheric chemist James Lovelock developed the Gaia theory. Embracing the circular logic of life and engineering systems, the Gaia theory states that Earth is a self-regulating complex system in which life interacts with and eventually becomes its own environment.

Gaia describes a living Earth: a body in the form of a planet. For billions of years, life has created an environment conducive to its continuation, influencing the physical attributes of Earth on a planetary scale. An idea with precedents in natural science and philosophy for millennia, Gaia resonates with the ancient magico-religious understanding that all is one: as above, so below. 

Fusing science, mathematics, philosophy, ecology and mythology, Gaia and Philosophy, with a new introduction by Dorion Sagan, challenges Western anthropocentrism to propose a symbiotic planet. In its striking philosophical conclusion, the revolutionary Gaia paradigm holds important implications not only for understanding life's past but for shaping its future. 

Edited by Nathan O’Donnell, Adrian Duncan, and Niamh Dunphy, Running feet, sharp noses: Essays on the animal world is a collection of essays on the animal world. Each piece is a meditation on how animals affect our sense of self, our memories, our actions.

With contributions by Latifa Akay, Sara Baume, John Berger, June Caldwell, Niamh Campbell, Vona Groarke, Edward Hoagland, Sabrina Mandanici, Darragh McCausland, Tim MacGabhann, Honor Moore, Eileen Myles, Stephen Sexton, Jessica Traynor, Erica Van Horn, and Suzanne Walsh.

What words made this world of captivity and extinction? If written language is a biological adaptation, how can a text reshape the environment? These are the questions at the heart of Grammar of the Cage, a startling first collection of poetry by Pam Ore. The Compulsive Reader calls Ore "a poet of great promise," and poet Eloise Klein Healy says she has found Ore's book "haunting but necessary...a stunning debut collection."

Grammar of the Cage is clean and heartbreaking as a bone, and yet, as poet Ingrid Wendt writes in her Introduction, "[like] Emily Dickinson, Ore's 'business' is 'to sing.' And sing she does."