Part of Finishing Line’s acclaimed chapbook series, Falling Bodies explores loss, identity, and family through the lens of the natural world. From the self as a Roman ruin to God as a big-handed homeboy, from Copernican systems to the doubt and lust of Darwin’s wife, the poet’s imagination is as far-reaching as her gaze is unflinching. These poems speak to universal issues, but are born of the author’s particular experience as an adoptee, mother, and lover in the landscape of her former home in Western Pennsylvania.

In her introduction to this year’s The Best American Essays, guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections “contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience.” Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and populist censorship movements, the twenty-one essays collected here reflect their authors’ unapologetic observations of the world around them. From an inmate struggling to find purpose during his prison sentence to a doctor coping with the unpredictable nature of her patient, to a widow wishing for just a little more time with her late husband, these narratives—and the others featured in this anthology—celebrate the endurance of the human spirit.

In a spiral form reminiscent of DNA, this memoir plumbs the unconsidered fallout of adoption. Part mystery, part meditation on identity and attachment, it explores the quest for roots, the desire to love and be loved, and the fear and bureaucracy that get in the way. (The manuscript is currently seeking a publisher.)