Table of Contents

Catalog I The Infinite Density of Grief • The Birth of Superstition • Nomenclature: The First Day • Miscarriage • Eve Paints the Apple Tree • The Sterility of Numbers • How to Speak Nineteenth Century • A Catalog of ?What We’re Not Meant to See • The Rift • Isaac Newton Waits Out the Plague • Wilson’s Warbler • The Mier Expedition: The Drawing of the Black Bean by Frederic Remington (1896) • How to Move Away • Something About Darwin Catalog II. Begin • After Seven Months, Alaskans Begin to Bury Their Dead • A Brief History of the Passenger Pigeon • Pre-Op • Taxonomy:Taxidermy • Correction • Platypus:Hoax • Decay • Found Poem: Sir Hamon L’Estrange Gives the Only Documented Account of a Living Dodo in Britain, 1638 • What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain • Pond • Hangman • I Hate Darwin • Horse Latitudes • Grief and Geometry • Primer • What Is Still, What Is Moving Catalog III. The Classification of Impermanence • The Second Son • Braids • Ballast • Still Life • My Grandmother Peels Apples for Sauce • Why We Speak English • The Quick of Things • Selling Skies at the Soho Bazaar, 1790 • At Forty • Darwin’s Twin Sister • Sugar in Space • On Reading About the Illness and Death of Darwin’s Daughter Annie • A Way with Words • Dickinsonia