The poems in What Nature were not written on Walden Pond. They were not written because poetry can save the Earth. If they are a far cry from last century’s nature poetry, it is because “nature” today is a far cry from sanctuary or retreat. These poems are not at ease and there is no place left to retreat. They are themselves far cries: urgent calls for rethinking our place on an imperiled planet.

April 4, 2018, marked the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death. This collection grapples with his enduring legacy. Though he is widely celebrated as a national hero—martyr to an inspiring dream about our country's largest possibilities—many younger Americans now greet his name with suspicion, viewing him as an essentially conservative figure. These essays offer critical engagement in place of canonization, recovering—and scrutinizing—the profoundly radical nature of King's political, moral, and religious thought.

Reader Katia Fowler says, “Global Dystopias is shattering and marvelous. I am in awe. Thank you for ripping my heart out and cradling it at the same time.” Publishers Weekly writes, “[S]ome of the best contributions . . . include nuanced examinations of gender-based oppression. In Charlie Jane Anders’s astoundingly good ‘Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue,’ the narrator is forced . . . into a body she doesn’t want and didn’t ask for. Maria Dahvana Headley’s ‘Memoirs of an Imaginary Country’ explores the connection between the colonization of women’s bodies and colonization of non-Western countries. Tananarive Due’s ‘The Reformatory’ reveals a single moment of horrific abuse in a young black boy’s . . . life. Maureen McHugh’s ‘Cannibal Acts’ and Nalo Hopkinson’s ‘Waving at Trains’ are excellent stories of viral apocalypses and their aftermath.”

Many of the critical issues of our time—from clean water to health care to schools—are about public goods, things that are owed to the members of a democratic society. In the United States, these goods are endangered and access to them is constricted by class and race. Against this background, Trump’s nearly empty White House stands as a symbol of the crisis our democracy faces. In this Forum we consider public goods: what they are, how to provide them, how to ensure equitable access. The debate about public goods is at heart a debate about what it means to be an American. What is at stake is not only what we owe to each other but who we are.

Technology and the loss of manufacturing jobs have many worried about future mass unemployment. It is in this context that basic income—a government cash grant given unconditionally to all—has gained support from a surprising range of advocates, from Silicon Valley to labor. Our contributors explore basic income’s merits, not only as a salve for financial precarity, but as a path toward racial justice and equality. Others, more skeptical, see danger in a basic income designed without attention to workers’ power and the quality of work. Together they offer a nuanced debate about what it will take to tackle inequality and what kind of future we should aim to create.

Walter Johnson, Harvard historian and author of the acclaimed River of Dark Dreams, urges us to embrace a vision of justice attentive to the history of slavery—not through the lens of human rights, but instead through an honest accounting of how slavery was the foundation of capitalism, a legacy that continues to afflict people of color and the poor. Inspired by Cedric J. Robinson’s work on racial capitalism, as well as Black Lives Matter and its forebears—including the black radical tradition, the Black Panthers, South African anti-apartheid struggles, and organized labor—contributors to this volume offer a critical handbook to racial justice in the age of Trump.

“In time of crisis, we summon up our strength,” wrote poet Muriel Rukeyser. This collection gathers poems—from the eve of the twenty-first century to the month following Trump’s election—to mark a moment of political rupture, summoning the collective strength found in the languages of resistance and memory, subversion and declamation, struggle and hope. Poetry is a counterforce. We offer these poems to readers as Rukeyser did—“not walls, but human things, human faces.”

Donald Trump claims to "cherish women," but his gendered insults suggest otherwise. But what if there was a clear rationale behind his apparent doublethink? In our forum "The Logic of Misogyny," Kate Manne argues that misogyny is not about hating women. It is about keeping them in “their place”—below men—in the patriarchal order. Vivian Gornick, Christina Hoff Sommers, Tali Mendelberg, Doug Henwood, Imani Perry, Susan J. Brison, and Amber A'Lee Frost respond. Michael Bronski argues that if gay liberation hadn't happened—with its impractical desire to upend society—then the gay rights movement would never have won its legal battles. Mike Konczal challenges a guiding principle of conservatives, pointing out it is absurd to believe that problems created by global deregulation can be solved at the local level. Donna Murch shows how personal debt is once again landing people in jail, even though debtors' prison was outlawed more than a century ago. Also: Anne Fausto-Sterling asks how soon is too soon for trans kids to transition; Colin Dayan on the cruelties the South doles out to animals, children, and black folks; and Oded Na’aman describes how Israel tricks itself into believing war is necessary. Plus new poetry by John Ashbery, Rae Armantrout, Charif Shanahan, Rebecca Liu, and more.