Our twenty-seventh book is a collection of non-fiction, fiction, poetry and artwork revolving around bodies, human, creaturely, plant and mineral. An anthology of the corporeal in times of crisis, collapse and change.
So much in our modern industrial culture encourages disembodiment – both from ourselves, as animal beings, and from the larger body of the Earth. The writing and artwork in this book explores the consequences of that detachment and the many different ways by which we might become re-embodied. Some contributors put their feet back on the ground through dance, while others put their bodies on the line during direct action protests. Connections are mapped between the spores of plants that predate dinosaurs and human autoimmune disease, and – as shown on our cover – between herbs and human healing. There are tales of bodies that do not conform to ‘healthy’ stereotypes, and how chronic sickness can be held up as a mirror to the ailments of the planet.
Also in this issue are stories of reabsorption in the world, whether through connections with mountains and waters, or the embodied ritual of becoming a tree. There are interspecies shapeshiftings and human-canine chimeras, posing questions of where bodies end and where they begin. Some of the pieces are visceral – peeling back the anatomies of Italian Renaissance Venuses, burying a road-killed mole in a nettle-fibre shroud, or plunging into the uncanny world of blood platelet donation – and, inevitably, death casts a shadow on this book. But its pages hum with life as well, from the palo verde beetle emerging from the Sonoran Desert, from crows, coyotes, jellyfish, mountain goats, mare’s tail, granite and trees, to the leafy guardian deity of the Amazon.
Bodies, far from being separate things – atomised, individual units existing in and of themselves – are connected, interpenetrating and curiously hard to define. Dark Mountain: Issue 27 celebrates that complexity, and how all of us are part of the body of the Earth.
You can read the full editorial here. To order your copy see below.
Our Spring Issue
Dark Mountain: Issue 27 (£18.99)
Our spring classic issue is a collection of writing and artwork on things bodily and broken, mended and mysterious, individual and collective, interrelated and entwined. Order from our website, or take out a subscription to future issues of Dark Mountain and get Issue 27 for only £12.99.
Our online edition
The Dark Mountain Project is an entirely reader-funded organisation. If you enjoy these newsletters or posts, please consider supporting our work by visiting our shop or becoming a subscriber to our books or the home for our online edition on Substack. All back issues in the archive are available either in print (Issues 19, 21-23, 25-28) or as PDFs (from £5). Many thanks!