Sensoria

A stunning gathering of creative nonfiction, research, and poetry, Sensoria will broaden the moral imaginations of its readers and challenge conventional worldviews about human relations to the nonhuman world.
Humans, along with all other creatures, are an entanglement of sensual relations, shaping and shaped by our somatic engagement with the world.
The essays and poetry of Sensoria transport readers into compelling stories and ethical reflections that stretch the limits of the moral imagination, calling attention to the wondrous ways in which humans and other-than-human beings experience and perceive the world, not just through the senses but within them.
By exploring the sensorium among all forms of life endowed with different kinds of consciousness and communicative abilities, this volume highlights ecologically and socially diverse ways of touching the world with mind, and touching mind with the world.
The sensory faculties are inherently about the capability of paying attention to other beings and forces that share our planet and whose lives are interwoven with our own.
For each of the five senses, the contributors to Sensoria—including music composer David Rothenberg, historian of color Carolyn Purnell, bio-philosopher Andreas Weber, filmmaker Kalyanee Mam, neuroethologist Bill Hansson, travel writer and novelist Nick Hunt, and religious scholar Graham Harvey—explore and illuminate the biology and neurology of sensation as well as the imaginative possibilities for understanding the senses.
This timely volume offers readers new ways of understanding relations in everyday encounters that link our inner and outer awareness—embodied experiences that shape what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell, and the way these perceptions can help us to attend more closely and respectfully to the lifeworlds of other-than-human creatures.

Sensoria: Attending to the Wonder and Vitality of Nature
Bruce Jennings and Gavin Van Horn, editors
Heather Swan, poetry editor


Table of Contents
 
Gavin Van Horn, Bruce Jennings, Heather Swan, A Song of Awakening: An Introduction to Sensoria


I. Seeing
Carolyn Purnell, In the Eye of the Beholder: Color Perception and Historical Difference
Brittney Corrigan, Vanishing
Sohini Basak, Close Your Eyes: A Reminder to Blink (Or What I Learn at Family Dinner Conversations)
Laura Sewall, An Ethical Eye
Lauren Camp, Instructions on the Sky
Lars Chittka, More Than Attraction: What Bees See in Flowers
Joshua Mabie, Blindness and Sight
Camille T. Dungy, In her mostly white town, an hour from Rocky Mountain National Park, a Black poet considers centuries of protests against racialized violence
Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, Glass Paradise
 
II. Hearing 
Liam Heneghan, Is This Essay Noise?
Nickole Brown, Prayer to Be Still and Know
David Rothenberg, Tibutibuvihihehehiu: Live with the Blyth’s Reed Warbler
J Drew Lanham, Forest Thrush Song Primer in 3 Haiku
Gordon Miller, The Pulse of Life and the Rhythms of Mind
Rebecca R. Burrill, Movement Makes Sound and Sound Is Movement: The Dance and Song of Embodiment in the Re-Enchantment of Learning
Gordon Hempton, Listening Is Not What You Think
Pacyinz Lyfoung, The day I learned to speak my grandmother’s tongue
Martin Lee Mueller and Austra Apsīte, You Are Skywoman Breathing, Singing
 
III. Smelling 
Elena Mancioppi, Arturo’s Multispecies Osmoverse
CMarie Fuhrman, Beargrass
Bill S. Hansson, Smell Masters
Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Savoring the Scent of Time
Gary Paul Nabhan, Coming to Our Senses the Hard Way
Nicholas Triolo, The Smell of Eternity
Kai Coggin, Night Blooming Cereus / Queen of the Night
 
IV. Tasting 
Kalyanee Mam, ស្គាល់ មជាតិ Knowing Your Taste
Brenda Cárdenas, Ofrenda de Otoño
Gavin Van Horn, Taste and See
Elizabeth Jacobson, One Taste
Orrin Williams, Urban, Sacred, Food
James Crews, More
Marcus Kes Pih Soh Mekek Grignon, Taste of Maple
Ross Gay, To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian
  
V. Touching 
Andreas Weber, Scarce Large Blue
Danusha Laméris, Stone
Heather Swan, The Sting of Awareness
Elizabeth Bradfield, Spinnaker
Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell, Touching the Dead: Elephant Funerary Bathing
Bruce Jennings, The Ambiguity of Touch
Catherine Jagoe, Praise Song for a Plane Tree
Gregory Hitch, Rooted in Place: The Power of Cedars and Soil
Gavin Van Horn, Soft Flesh
  
VI. Sensing Together 
Heather Swan, Gleam
Nick Hunt, Travel Sense
Alexa Firmenich, Desire Mandalas
Jane Hirshfield, One Reports Oneself Missing
John MacNeill Miller, Our Time Is Limited 
Graham Harvey, Hedgehogs All the Way Around: Sensing Kinship in the Larger-than-Human World
Jennifer Oakes, Orectic
Erin Jayne Williams, Earthbound Heart
Rachel Harris, Ayahuasca Plant Teacher
John Hausdoerffer, Senses of Place
 
Permissions
 
Acknowledgments
 
Contributors