Orion Magazine

Donovan Arthen DIRECTOR OF FINANCE AND OPERATIONS Ananda Bagiackas CUSTOMER SERVICE SPECIALIST Amy Brady EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AND PUBLISHER Tracie Butler-Kurth PHILANTHROPIC STRATEGIST Christopher Cox EDITOR AT LARGE Camille Dungy POETRY EDITOR Amanda

SHORTLY BEFORE those of us with steady doors would take shelter behind them, I ventured out to the Poor People’s Campaign’s National Call for Moral Revival at Second Congregational Church, where James Shearer growled from the pulpit, “Homelessness sh

"WHAT DOES THE LAND WANT?" We gather in ceremony to hold this central question, trusting the forest will answer in its own time. Around the circle we introduce ourselves to our host, this magnificent nine hundred acres of unceded Kashia and Southern

WHEN MY FATHER DIED, I began making weekly visits to a public grief house. I mean greenhouse. For seven Mondays, I rode the streetcar across town to warm myself in a glass building full of plants. No one had warned me that hard-hitting losses sometim

FOR YEARS, my mother hauled me to St. Mary’s Parish. Sunday mass was a habit for most Boston Catholics, but one she, and I, would eventually shed. On the church’s brick steps, I dreaded the misery that awaited me on the pew, granite-hard under my scr

ROAM THE KALAHARI DESERT any time of year and you may come upon the unusual site of an enormous hay bale in an acacia tree. Draw closer and you’ll glimpse the architects of this marvel—a riot of sparrow-size sociable weaverbirds (Philetairus socius),

Tonight, a storm. And I hear weak humming drift down the throat of this rain-voiced house. My son is asleep when I check, but the first notes sounded like the softness of him upstairs learning by singing to soothe his own doubts. I’ve answered that h

In the face of death, the California dandelion will raise its stalk to face a breeze head on Come springtime, our picket white fence will encapsulate a cemetery cosplaying as a garden I picked flowers to congratulate my aunt on passing her citizenshi

My mother built our house from spit and sticks, then shoved me out. She shoved me out. Herself, too. Mud, straw soft as knit. Grass against the east wall. Sunrise. She cared, then flung us both to the ice wind. (Spring isn’t always warm, I learned. S

IT WAS THROUGH the glass screen of my windshield that I first saw the people, residents of the city of Philadelphia, where I also live, who suffer from drug addictions so severe that they live, unhoused, unprotected from the elements, buying, injecti

MAYBE IT’D BE A STAND OF TREES encircling a ground soft with pine needles, out of view of neighbors so as not to scare them, but close enough that, should danger come, there might be a witness. That’s the kind of place George McCarthy adds to his men

Dial Books AFTER SPENDING his childhood in a refugee camp in Kenya before emigrating to the United States, Omar Mohamed knew that he wanted to write the story of his experience caring for his younger brother, Hassan, in a supposedly temporary living

W. W. Norton & Company BEFORE THE FILM was the book, and before the book was the rising practice of what might be called capitalist orientation programs: so-called support resources from corporations to aid their employees in coping with the abject q

Kaya Press “TRUONG … this is not what happened to you.” In Book of the Other, gay Vietnamese refugee and immigrant Truong Tran shares his experience of being perpetually viewed as an outsider, as other. Using stark prose, essays, and poems, Tran reco

Custom House IN THE GUTTING tradition of Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich, Wendy Pearlman deftly collects intimate observations, poetic fragments, and devastating testimonies garnered from hundreds of interviews with displaced Syrians. The e

Riverhead Books WHAT IF MIGRATION didn’t involve a life-or-death journey across national boundaries but instead anyone could walk through a door and end up in another country? Mohsin Hamid poses this question in Exit West, a magic realist novel about