Pure Life: hydrothermal vents and the deep sea yeti crab, Kiwaidae, and Imbler's time in Seattle, where they moved for an internship. They explore the parallels of space and movement between the crab and them; inhospitable space transformed by a monthly queer POC party, and dancing, the crab farming the bacteria attached to their bristles. "It is exactly suited to the life it leads." How do we place our selves in the natural world? What are the costs and gains of our attachment to it? Where would you put Sabrina Imbler's astounding book on the shelf? In a separate section, marked: Awe and Wonder"

A young queer science writer on some of the ocean's strangest creatures and what they can teach us about human empathy and survival. As a mixed Chinese and white non-binary writer working in a largely white, male field, science journalist Sabrina Imbler has always been drawn to the mystery of life in the sea, and particularly to creatures living in hostile or remote environments. Each essay in their debut collection profiles one such creature: the mother octopus who starves herself while watching over her eggs, the Chinese sturgeon whose migration route has been decimated by pollution and dams, the bizarre Bobbitt worm (named after Lorena) and other uncanny creatures lurking in the deep ocean, far below where the light reaches. SARAH NEILSON: How did this book come together in its form as a collection of essays that each extrapolate ideas, metaphors, or lessons about life from one sea creature?

Pink Sea-Fan

It] is a creature unlike any other – one that grips you with its tentacles and pulls you down into new depths. It is impossible to read this book and not be transformed" I would recommend this book to anyone looking to understand some sea animals and humans in one book, and for queer, mixed race, or trans people who want to feel seen and understood.

Almost every system we exist in is cruel, and it is our job to hold ourselves accountable to a moral center separate from the arbitrary ganglion of laws that, so often, get things wrong. ”As the title suggests, in each essay Imbler takes a sea creature — an octopus that starves while guarding its eggs for four years, a giant worm called a sand striker, a rogue goldfish, a yeti crab — and writes about its life while extrapolating into themes of family, loneliness, queerness, community care, assault, and the extreme beauty and precarity of Earth and its vast oceans. One essay about whale fall, which is when the body of a dead whale lands at the bottom of the ocean, providing vital nutrients to other sea creatures, and necropsy reports might make you cry; Imbler’s prose manages to be both poignant and very funny. This book is perfect for anyone who ever feels curious about or in awe of sea creatures, humanity, and the vast emotional landscapes inside ourselves. SN: In that essay, you write about the difference between living and reliving and how both can be, for a jellyfish, a physiological experience, but it can also be a psychological or emotional process for people. Can you elaborate on the difference between living and reliving, and nonlinear trajectories of life?

It seems a shame that an animal able to sense so much of the world occupies it so There was one stunning paragraph where the author knows she is being hypocritical, but is talking only of her own half-Chinese ethnicity and complaining of it. I am complaining about the moment when the Asian woman's parentage is explained by one white person to another - Chinese mom and Jewish dad - like a caption, a specimen ID. Sarah Neilson is a freelance culture writer and interviewer whose work regularly appears in The Seattle Times , Them , and Shondaland , among other outlets. They are an alum of the Tin House craft intensive, and their memoir writing has been published in Catapult and Ligeia . If I were a more ruthless detective of my own life, more sure that I could love myself knowing all the things I’ve done and the things done to me while I was not there, perhaps I would have had the courage to ask him what he was talking about. But I am not, so I did not.”

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Reading notes This book is after a few chapters, so far successful, very strange mix of science, being young and gay and full of angst, and the story of her mother in China. It's quite unclassifiable but interesting. There are quite mind-boggling sentences, "My grandmother grew up believing she was ugly because everyone told her so. A friend of her father's, their wealthy neighbour's sixth concubine always told my mother she was ugly, even for a five year old."