The Science of Last Things: Essays on Deep Time and the Boundaries of the Self

"Offering a deeply necessary, clear-eyed look at who we are as flesh-and-bone bodies during the climate crisis, this is a book that searches and finds meaning in both the hard truths and the value of wonder."—Ada Limón In this luminous collection of essays, Ellen Wayland-Smith probes the raw edges of human existence, those periods of life in which our bodies remind us of our transience and the boundaries of the self dissolve. For it is in such liminal states—losing a parent, giving birth, experiencing a nervous breakdown, coping with breast cancer—that we, too, are part of "the cosmic molecular arc that binds all life." From the Old Testament to Maggie Nelson, these explorations are grounded in a rich network of associations. In an essay on the postpartum body, Wayland-Smith interweaves her experience as a mother with accounts of phantom limbs and Greek mythology to meditate on moments when pieces of our being exist outside our bodies....