Amy Irvine’s most recent book, Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics and Place, was co-authored by Pam Houston. Her essay, “Dear Mr. Abbey,” was excerpted from Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness, a feminist response to Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, and was included in Orion’s 25 Most-Read Articles of the Decade. Irvine teaches in the Mountainview MFA program of Southern New Hampshire University. She lives and writes off the grid in southwest Colorado.
Amy Irvine
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The Patrescene
We crawled naked from the caves, staggered in from the hunts, to find someone had planted a seed. Our hands, stained with charcoal, ocher. Bodies spent, but swirling with beasts we’d Continue reading
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Spectral Light
In the dead of night the human brain is most capable of distillation—of boiling things down to basic black and white. Smoke means fire. Breaking glass signals intrusion. From an evolutionary Continue reading
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Ungulate Love
This dispatch is a follow-up by author Amy Irvine, whose Autumn 2020 feature, “Close to the Bone,” travels from the Mongolian steppe to southwestern United States to contrast the ancient hungers Continue reading
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Close to the Bone
Ancient hungers and modern fare. Continue reading
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Dear Mr. Abbey
HEY, MR. ABBEY, can you hear me down there? This yolk of sun has broken on a horizon sawed in two by saguaros and I’ve hopscotched my way through crypto and Continue reading