The World It Was

An elegiacal collection looks unflinchingly at the degradations of the planet and the human body with an urgent appeal to live fully and presently

Written in the wake of the COVID pandemic lockdown, mass ecological tragedy, a chronic illness diagnosis, and the death of Twichell's husband, The World it Was turns its gaze upon loss with unflinching lucidity. “Language is a door," Twichell writes—yet, in The World it Was, she circles that door warily, questioning whether words can ever grant true communion with what lies beyond them. As she travels between memories of her childhood and reflections on her aging body, Twichell's signature attentiveness and restraint calls the reader to build a dwelling in the uneasy space between presence and grief. Part elegy, part meditation, The World It Was listens for the quiet intelligence of nature even as it mourns what has been destroyed. What remains is a grief that refuses consolation, instead insisting upon the necessity of seeing, naming, and being fully alive inside the brief body and the dying world.