Summers’s exploration of the aging face activist Keah Brown’s journey to move beyond self-hatred Casey Hannan’s experience living with epilepsy, and Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar’s meditation on overcoming addiction reveal much about the quest to obtain some measure of control over our bodies. The prompt was simple, says Gay in her editor’s note: “What does it mean to live in an unruly body?” What follows is a diverse and compelling collection of works that explore the human desire to “master” our physical selves. The online pop-up magazine, titled Unruly Bodies, offers an anthology of essays by a veritable dream team of writers-National Book Award finalist Carmen Maria Machado, comedian Samantha Irby, translator Randa Jarrar, Catapult editor Mensah Demary, and the author known as Your Fat Friend among them-that provides an eye-opening education in the ways a body can refuse, resist, shock, persist, revolt, contradict, and overcome. If you are suffering from the double impact of mercury in retrograde and the unceasing political maelstrom, one way to feel that things are looking up after all is to head over to Medium, where Roxane Gay-acclaimed author of Hunger, freshly appointed Guggenheim fellow, and Twitter slayer extraordinaire-is assembling perfect truths about one of the world’s last great mysteries: the human body.
