THIS LIMITED EDITION IS NOW SOLD OUT. A PDF version of Issue 9 is available here. Keep an eye out for our winter archive offer next month!
Humbleness comes from the Latin humus, meaning ‘earth’; so to be humble means to lay oneself low, but also to be grounded, to return to the solid and material. In their own ways, the art works, poems, stories and essays in this volume explore different ways of re-communion with the Earth. Here the certainties on which the edifices of civilisation teeter are replaced with the small, the unpretentious, the discomforting.
Familiar names – Em Strang avoiding the global news to bear witness to more immediate worlds, Adam Dinan and Tom Smith investigating microbial life – and established figures like Derrick Jensen can be found alongside new contributors and fresh perspectives: Nadia Lucia Peralta on the ecstatic loss of self at carnival time, Fern Leigh Albert recording life off-grid in Dartmoor with her camera, and Claire Liss considering the evolution of plant medicine.
As we enter dark times, these disparate voices challenge the grand narratives of recrimination and despair, so that the universe appears afresh as a collection of wonders – bewildering objects, transforming passions and moments of transcendent awe. With such humbling comes a simplicity, a singleness of vision and a return to a more honest appraisal of what it means to be human.
As with all Dark Mountain publications, this book is a beautiful physical object, designed and typeset by our friends at Bracketpress in Lancashire, with colour plates for artworks such as Rebecca Clark’s drawings, Rogan Brown’s papercut ‘time fossils’ and visionary New Zealand landscapes by Kate Williamson. Meanwhile walking artist, Monique Besten collects paper boats as she crosses the mountains to the Paris summit, performance artist Robert Leaver digs himself into various holes in earth snow, and rock, from Italy to Cape Cod, and storyteller-artists, Kahn & Selesnick relate one of their fantastical Tales from a Drowning World.
You can order you archive copy of Issue 9 from our online shop here.
IMAGE: from ‘Hole Earth’ by Robert Leaver
