ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.–Conjunctions:64, Natural Causes—the latest issue of the innovative literary magazine published by Bard College—offers a provocative collection of radical reinventions of the nature-writing genre. Readers encounter shrimp farms and spoonbills, maize husks and Austrian woods, tarantulas and eels, multitudinous winds that pollinate or desiccate—nature in all its myriad forms, right down to photons, neutrons, neutrinos, and, yes, even Godzilla, the Sasquatch, and other of nature’s fictive and folkloric monsters. Edited by Conjunctions editor, novelist, and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow, Natural Causes includes newly translated poems from the late Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, as well as new fiction, poetry, and essays from such leading contemporary writers as Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, China Miéville, Ann Lauterbach, Lily Tuck, Benjamin Hale, Miranda Mellis, Thalia Field, Noy Holland, and Michael Ives, among others.

“Nature has traditionally played a rich, central role in literature, sometimes becoming a character itself,” writes Morrow. “Natural Causes is less a dispatch from the Sierra Club—although concern for our environment and appreciation of its ravishing beauty and diversity are very much on the minds of these writers—than a reimagining of how nature writing can be written. Here are 25 engagements not only with our natural world but with the ways in which we contemplate it in art and essay.”

Natural Causes also features new work from Matthew Baker, Martine Bellen, Diana George, Evelyn Hampton, Karen Hays, Greg Hrbek, Christine Hume, Lucy Ives, Sarah Mangold,Sequoia Nagamatsu, Matthew Pitt, Jessica Reed, James Reidel, Margaret Ross, Meredith Stricker, and Wil Weitzel.