Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Summer grass aches and whispers.

It wants something; it calls and sings; it pours
out wishes to the overhead stars.

— Carl Sandburg / “Summer Grass”

They know, from the past few years of massively lethal heat waves—there were an estimated seventy thousand heat-related deaths in 2022, forty-eight thousand in 2023, sixty-three thousand in 2024—that global warming has already transformed the temperate European summer into a hotter, more dangerous season. Even so, 2026, which, thus far, has featured five lethal heat waves and a historic spate of destructive wildfires, has triggered alarm across the Continent, and beyond. A habitat, and, with it, a host of cultural traditions—Wimbledon, the Tour de France, strolling down La Rambla on a sunny afternoon—were at risk this year, and will be more so in the years to come.

— Eric Klinenberg / “The End of the European Summer” / The New Yorker 

Once, Dorianne told me
of the moment her mother finally
admitted, apologized even,
for the spotty passage
of her childhood years, how often
they proved a woods rife with wolves
and teeth and trickery enough
to make a girl want to gaze into
the maw of an open oven
and mistake that boundless dark
for a candle.

— Michelle Bitting / “Yet, the Loveliness”

At best I manage a few fitful hours. As soon as I wake, I try to think of how I might pass the day in order to exhaust myself, but nothing works. Combinations of pills and intoxicating substances buy a meager ounce of darkness, but this is not rest, it is oblivion. I crawl out of these sleeps, these murky no-man’s-lands, as out of a grave and feel like a zombie in the daytime, but I will take it. I will take anything. I close my door and descend. A slow fog creeps into my brain, I cannot focus and find it difficult to read, but I cannot remember if I used to feel differently, or what differently used to feel like.

It seems to me I may have always felt and been and thought this way, a timeless nothing.

— Emily LaBarge / Dog Days

I can not feel her voice I am too far away skiing in Austria.
Perhaps I will go to another country disguised as frozen gas
And travel beneath her skirt into the center of the earth.
I have an air bubble in my ear that needs light.
It is yellow as I slip over the lintel to correct the sun.

— Frank Lima / “Submarine”

And it seems that in this I am not alone.

Wilderness is a powerful, ancient concept, which lies at the intersection of landscape, philosophy and ecology. It is a place where the human is brought into confrontation with all that is non-human, and is challenged and changed as a result. For thousands of years people have sought out regions of uncontrolled, unknown or uncharted nature in search of religious epiphany, self-actualisation and an escape from what was to them modern life. Wilderness has been the scene of exploration, both physical and psychological, as well as a site of first contacts, privations, moral catastrophes and heroics.

— Cal Flyn / The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness 

I think Cliff Swallow sounds like the name
of a beige-clad mortgage broker who hangs
out at the bar and doesn’t talk politics, but
it’s a bird I’m reading about to keep my mind
from diving fast into the abyss. If someone asked
what changed me first, I’d say love. Secondly,
I’d say death. Does the order matter?

— Ada Limón / “Dusk After Your Passing”

What I’m Listening To:

Breathe like a crash or just before
I am when you know it’s coming
So try, the sky is on the floor
Safe restraint, I’m on the ceiling
There is no meaning

— Ty Segall / “Hospital”