books – Antonia Malchik

The East India Company and the power of corporate stories

May 11, 2024May 11, 2024by Antonia MalchikLeave a Comment

Welcome back to On the Commons! For those of you who are new here, On the Commons is a newsletter exploring ownership and its inevitable injustices, investigating centuries of philosophical and legal arguments made in defense of private property for a much simpler explanation: theft. Or in other words, “I took it; now it’s mine,” and the consequences both large and small for our shared world.

This is an updated, slightly revised version of a post first published on 31 December 2021. This is the third in a series of essays republished from earlier years. The previous one was on the Doctrine of Discovery.

Both top and bottom photos are of No Trespassing signs on the fence of land owned in my town by the Burlington Northern-Santa Fe railway company.

The Boston Tea Party is one of the defining stories of America’s founding as a nation. I remember learning about it year after year in school in the 1980s. Probably every American kid does. What was never said in those scrappy little classrooms across Montana is that the story of the Boston Tea Party is also one of the sharpest tools wielded in defense of the mythologies that make up the American ideal. The fact that it was an illegal riot that destroyed private property doesn’t just get glossed over; it’s never presented that way, not in the U.S. anyway. To present it that way would fly in the face of the American ideology that private property is bedrock. Instead, the story is presented as noble: the little nation that could refusing injustice imposed by a far-off monarchy.

What also gets glossed over is that the impetus for the riot wasn’t simply taxes; it was taxes imposed by government in order to benefit a private corporation.

The struggle over taxes in the British colonies of North America had been ongoing for years. The tax on tea, however, had a second purpose besides enriching King George III: the British Parliament wanted to keep the tea tax as a symbolic acknowledgment that the government maintained its right to tax the colonies, but they also wanted to help the East India Company claw its way out of debt. The story of the Boston Tea Party, the real one, points to the longer history of government enabling corporate power and profit until it essentially becomes an arm of the corporation itself.

The East India Company had its own private army. It in effect controlled all of India at one point, nominally representing Britain’s interests but serving its own.

Swarnali Mukherjee has written extensively in Berkana about what the British Crown and the East India Company’s actions meant for the economy of India. I encourage you to read the entirety of her essay on this subject, to understand the importance of the point she makes:

“The construction of railways was funded by Indian taxpayers, and the economic benefits often flowed back to Britain in the form of profits pocketed by British shareholders. The total wealth drain of India under British rule, in today’s value is an estimated $45 trillion.”

As with many of our modern corporate-government revolving doors and mutual back-scratching habits, the interests of the corporation often enveloped, or became, those of the state, as noted in this Financial Times article on the East India Company and its implications for modern capitalism:

“The EIC remains history’s most ominous warning about the potential for the abuse of corporate power — and the insidious means by which the interests of shareholders can seemingly become those of the state. . . .

For just as the lobbying of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was able to bring down the government in Iran and United Fruit that of Guatemala in the 1950s; just as ITT lobbied to bring down Salvador Allende’s Chile in the 1970s and just as ExxonMobil has lobbied the US more recently to protect its interests in Indonesia, Iraq and Afghanistan, so the EIC was able to call in the British navy to enhance its power in India in the 18th century. And just as Facebook today can employ Nick Clegg, the former UK deputy prime minister, so the EIC was able to buy the services of Lord Cornwallis, who surrendered Yorktown to Washington.”

It’s a long but excellent article (and unfortunately I think now paywalled), detailing the Company’s permission to wage war, and instances of forced privatization across the world at the Company’s behest. It also points to England having isolated itself from the rest of Europe due to wars over religion (I assume the author was referring to the abandonment of Catholicism and establishment of the Church of England) as a factor prompting the country to look for markets outside of Europe, a vital ingredient for colonialism:

“The English were forced to scour the globe for new markets and commercial openings further afield, and to do so they had no compunction but to use, for the first time in history, unbridled corporate violence.”

One of the questions I keep asking myself is if government, of almost any form but particularly of the nation-state, has always existed to serve private interests. Its main claim to enforcement of law is a monopoly on state violence, most often employed in the name of protecting private property, rather than protecting citizens from harm.

This is obvious when you look at laws and police actions against something like constructing an oil pipeline. The pipeline is private property built in pursuit of profit; therefore, it qualifies for legal protection from the state even though it threatens clean air, water, and soil—even if it takes others’ private property in turn. The U.S. government’s power of eminent domain, after all, was first used for private gain when railroads were being built across the continent, and has continued to be wielded in the name of private profit ever since—the Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. City of New London (2005) and the Pennsylvania District Court case granting eminent domain to a pipeline builder over the objections of a family of maple tree farmers in 2016 are only very recent examples of a longstanding pattern.

What to do about it is another question. Even democratically elected representatives are eager, as we see all too clearly every day, to promote corporate interests over that of their constituents if it assures them a safer and longer place in a seat of power. We need democracy and the right to vote, but those tools aren’t enough to assure a livable planet and lives of dignity. They are necessary conditions, but not sufficient.

There’s a tendency to just say, f— it, burn it all down and start over. But that’s been done more than once throughout history, in several places within living memory, and all it results in is a lot of suffering and the same cycles starting over again. It’s as if there’s something broken at the center of humanity, or at least a sizable portion of humanity, and we’re never going to find a better way to live together until we clearly define the shape and scope of that brokenness. As long as we* accept structures that prioritize private profits over life and health, pollution and structural injustice is all we’ll get.

If I believed in the devil, it would be someone in a sharp suit promising me two or three generations of decent jobs in exchange for the water, soil, and air I depend on, with the added bonus of sacrificing my kids’ health and senses of themselves as free human beings. It is the purest kind of evil to smile and hand out some cash while snipping the threads that link us to life.

The stories we tell and accept about ourselves and others have tremendous power. If we can change the stories, maybe we can begin to change something about our lives.

Instead of trying to burn it all down, plenty of people focus on building from the ground up—better systems, better ways of doing and being and living: this profile of a local food and farm co-op in Washington is a reminder that even when things feel like they’re falling apart, there are people and networks all over the world trying to piece them back together. Montana’s Alternative Energy Resource Organization (AERO) has been working against corporate agriculture for decades, from lobbying for a different kind of Farm Bill that works for people and food rather than commodities, to producing the bulk of the country’s organic lentils and heirloom grains like kamut. Oakland’s Unity Council has also been working for decades on affordable housing, higher-quality food access, and integrated public transportation in Fruitvale, one of the city’s poorest areas.

There are plenty more. I’m reminded of these organizations and people every time I work on a story about urban planning, affordable housing, or pedestrian advocacy. They are everywhere. They just never get featured on cable news or the podcasts of so-called “thought leaders.”

Changing our systems to serve people involves all of these efforts. And they don’t have to be scaled up—they have most power and efficacy when they stay connected to a particular place and community. Instead of scaling up small, workable, place-based systems, we need to take out the support systems that keep oppressive conglomerations afloat, from tax subsidies to weak interpretation of anti-monopoly laws (which should always include what monopolies truly cost life). And of course to change the way a large percentage of human beings see themselves as co-existing with the rest of life, which is no small task after millennia of negating and oppressing this reality.

During a recent U.S. election cycle, my state elected a governor who ran on the tired trope of lowering taxes, “creating jobs,” and being a successful businessman. People in my state are actually very good at “creating jobs.” Small business owners sometimes feel as common as pine trees. Many of those jobs—upwards of 70,000—are dependent on a healthy commons in the form of clean rivers full of fish and public lands that provide the kind of solace and clean air that no job could touch.

It’s often hard to get people to acknowledge the existence of these jobs and the kind of healthy shared commons that make them possible because our idea of a “job” is so starved of meaning and hamstrung by identity and self-perception. (Journalism jobs have fallen by 65% in the last 20 years, for example, while coal jobs have fallen by 61%, but we don’t hear much about the former.) Working in a lumber mill is a job; working as a fishing guide is, too, but also somehow isn’t the kind of job you’re talking about when you’re voting for “job creators.” Real jobs means lumber mills, slaughterhouses, car factories, oil pipelines, tech engineers. It means hundreds of people, massive profits for the bosses, and a no-holds-barred attitude when it comes to environmental destruction. Maybe it’s the type of job or maybe it’s the number of people employed at each operation, but there are plenty of small businesses that somehow don’t count when it comes to political rhetoric.

This is just a story we’ve been told, one that people then tell one another. But we are capable of telling different stories. We just need more people doing so, and then acting on them.

The East India Company and various colonial governments were very effective at telling stories. They’ve left legacies of imperial pride that still resonate and warp people’s thinking today, and blind us to the dangers of corporate power. As that Financial Times article pointed out:

“We still talk about the British conquering India, but that phrase disguises a more sinister reality. For it was not the British government that began seizing chunks of India in the mid-18th century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London.”

The company did so with the support of the British Crown, and when the EIC was facing further debts from their activities and obligations worldwide, the Crown stepped in once again to help them recoup losses through a monopoly and tax on tea in what they saw as their “possessions” in America. To quote from the Boston Tea Party’s own museum:

“The British East India Company was suffering from massive amounts of debts incurred primarily from annual contractual payments due to the British government totaling £400,000 per year. Additionally, the British East India Company was suffering financially as a result of unstable political and economic issues in India, and European markets were weak due to debts from the French and Indian War among other things. Besides the tax on tea which had been in place since 1767, what fundamentally angered the American colonists about the Tea Act was the British East India Company’s government sanctioned monopoly on tea.”

The East India Company is one of many lessons throughout history of the dangers inherent in encouraging the mutual support of corporate and state power. There are countless examples to explore, like the land stolen throughout North America and given by the U.S. government to railway companies, with profits for the railway and timber industries continuing even to the present day. The timber company Weyerhaeuser, for example, first bought 900,000 acres from the Northern Pacific Railway in 1900, and now profits off of not just the trees grown on land they own, but on the land itself, which the combination of state and corporate power has turned into “real estate.”

Phrases like that—“real estate”—carry their own stories, their own burials of what land has been, could be, and is.

We can change what we believe, starting with what we think we know about history and the real, live world around us. We can tell better stories about what is possible and what we’re capable of. We need to, because corporate growth and greed will not stop taking and commodifying and destroying all that makes life worthwhile, nor will it stop fabricating stories that make vast numbers of people believe it’s inevitable, unstoppable, and probably for the best. We need more stories, better stories, and we need them everywhere in hopes that those stories can, over time, change what is.

Change takes a lot of time and a lot of work. We can start by finding and amplifying as many instances as possible of people doing real work in real communities to make their worlds better. We can commit to finding, and believing in, different stories—the ones that make us realize a different world is possible, and then making it probable.

*“We” is a word I frequently stumble over and have begun to specify more clearly since this piece was first published. Fundamentally, I think English just needs a different word, or a few different words, to bring about more nuance when talking about societal thinking that shouldn’t be characterized as “us vs. them” while also finding ways to make it clear who is meant by every varied instance of “we.”

We are marvelous

March 22, 2024by Antonia MalchikLeave a Comment

Graffiti Pier, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Several people have asked how No Trespassing, this book I’m writing, is coming along. It is, it’s coming along, I promise! Many months later than I’d planned, but given that I have a job (for those who don’t know, I work as a copy editor for K-12 textbook publishers) and am the primary caregiver in my household, I should have planned more flexibly. I thought tinkering out this first chapter on land ownership would be straightforward, since it’s what I’ve researched most, but that might be part of the problem. It keeps sprawling, with always another book to read, on top dealing with of a number of personal situations over the last couple months. You know, weeks of scrambling around some half-emergency but also doesn’t everyone want to know just a little more about how much John Locke tailored his philosophy to justify colonial land theft?

I can research forever, it’s a problem.

I’m finally feeling like it’s taken form enough to get back in touch with my generous beta readers about their timelines and availability. The second chapter, on water, was written for my original book proposal, so it should take far less time to get in shape (famous last words). Thank you for your patience and interest in this work! I think it’s important, and I’m grateful that you do, too.

A couple of weeks ago I met someone I’ve revered for years: Lucy, named Dink’inesh in Amharic, meaning “you are marvelous.” Dink’inesh is of the species Australopithecus afarensis, one of Homo sapiens’ many hominin ancestors, and lived approximately 3.2 million years ago. Paleoanthropologist Jerry DeSilva, whom I interviewed about bipedalism for A Walking Life and who invited me to Dartmouth College to talk with students recently, showed me around his lab and there she was—a replica; Lucy herself is safely in Ethiopia, her home—resting on a foam bed sculpted to fit her bones.

It’s hard to describe how thrilling this kind of meeting is for me. I wrote about the feeling in A Walking Life, when Nick Ashton at the British Museum handed me a cast of fossilized footprints found on the Norfolk coast and estimated to be between 800,000 and 900,000 years old; it’s the depth of time that gets me, that immense geological knowing of planetary life.

Thrill is the best word I can think of to describe these encounters. A shiver down the spine, the sense of being in the presence of wonder and mystery, life that puts every one of my own existential worries into the context of time so vast that it’s a miracle we’re even aware of our own existence.

On that same trip, I got to meet up and walk with several people whose conversation and company put those same existential worries into a different kind of context, the one brought by reminders of our interconnections and relationships. The contexts that make human life beautiful and worthwhile for me and remind me what I learned while researching A Walking Life: most people want the best for others. Sometimes it can feel like that “most” barely scrapes 50% of humanity, but it’s there nevertheless. I’ve learned it over and over, probably because I’ve had to learn it over and over. It’s too easy for me to believe the opposite.

I got to meet, in person for the first time ever, two women I’ve been in a writing group with for well over a decade. We were meeting over Google Hangouts once a month long before online gatherings became the norm! To be able to hug them both, walk through Mount Auburn cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while we talked, and share food and more hugs, meant more to me than I realized it would. These people have been special to me through half of my writing life and almost my entire parenting life, and I’m grateful, even, for all the hard times we’ve shared together.

Before I met with Jerry DeSilva and his students, field biologist Bryan Pfeiffer, who writes the excellent nature-focused newsletter Chasing Nature, went farther out of his way than he should have so that we could go for a walk together on part of the Appalachian Trail and into an ice-covered hemlock forest, looking for mosses and lichens and talking about writing, books, the trials and tribulations of digital media platforms, and what I could use to take better pictures of Moon if I give up my smartphone (something I’m thinking about). I’ve learned so much about birds, dragonflies, buds, and photography from Bryan’s writing, it’d be hard to describe it all, but it doesn’t come close to hanging out in person for a few hours.

From there I had a fly-through visit with an old friend from graduate school, and then took a bus and then a train to Philadelphia, where JJ Tiziou let me stay at his place so I could participate in his Walk Around Philadelphia, which is in its third year. I was really looking forward to this walk because I love that kind of thing but even more so because writers Thomas Pluck and Chad O live in the region and had told me they signed up for it.

I wrote a whole book about walking, I might have mentioned a few times, and I wholeheartedly believe in its gifts for us as individuals, for our communities, for nature and our sense of belonging in this world. But I feel like I’m always relearning those same lessons. I was looking forward to talking with Chad about his

Scientific Animism work, and meeting Tom and telling him how much I enjoyed his posts about the New Jersey Pine Barrens, and his thriller The Boy from County Hell, which I’d read on the plane (as I said to him, I don’t usually read thrillers because I don’t handle violence well, but I fell for the characters immediately and it made a welcome break from forcing myself through chapters of Ellen Meiksins Wood’s The Origin of Capitalism), and when we were all gathered at the meeting spot I met reader Caroline (hi!), who’d come up from Washington, D.C., and whose work in Kazakhstan I still want to know more about.

It was in walking with these people and having these conversations that I remembered all the things I believe about walking, that it connects us to one another and to ourselves, that it reminds us that we’re animals evolved on a living planet, that it makes our interactions richer, that it brings us face to face with a world that our species has been co-evolving with even before Lucy and her people lived what I’m certain were loving, fraught, rich lives on the land that is now called Ethiopia.

Tom has a great post on his newsletter about this walk, which has more and better photos—including a selfie of the two of us—and Chad found me an almost completely faded “No Trespassing” sign that I’d overlooked while wondering if I should crawl through a hole in the fencing.

When A Walking Life was being published, I told the marketing people that I’d wanted to write a book for the “everywalker.” I was tired of reading about philosophers and writers wandering through pristine woods and up remote mountain peaks. This is our world, I’ve said. We have the right to walk it, in all its glory and grit.

Being reminded of these realities matters to me. These connections and relationships matter to me. All of it: walking with old friends I’d never met in person, walking with a friend and colleague in a gorgeous frozen forest, walking with new friends and acquaintances along the sometimes ragged-looking borders of a city beloved (hopefully) by a million and a half people.

I carried Lucy with me that day, walking the border of Philadelphia. In his descriptions of the walk, JJ asks participants to consider borders and boundaries, including within ourselves. Where are our own mental and physical limitations? How do we negotiate decisions, like which half-formed path to take in a woods unknown to any of us, or when to stop at the end of the day?

After miles of walking through woods and on concrete, my left knee let me know how much it disapproved of all this motion. The group tried unsuccessfully to find a place for a cold drink and possibly hot food; Tom and I lingered back, talking and, in my case, wondering when I could give my knee a rest.

When paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson first found Lucy in 1974, he found her left knee crushed beyond repair, destroying a key piece of evidence about her bipedalism.* But her spine, pelvis, and foot bones, along with other evidence from nearby fossils of her species, confirm that she walked upright on two legs. If I remember correctly what Jerry DeSilva has told me, signs in her vertebra also point to the possibility that she lived with pain.

Lucy tells us a tremendous amount about how we came to be what we are. One of the reasons I find the presence of her kind of deep time so thrilling is that these details of evolution tell us just as much about who we are, if we let them. Lucy likely experienced pain, just like I did walking miles around Philadelphia. Did she ever ask her group to slow down, take a break, as I perhaps should have?

Walking with a group, especially when I’m tired or hungry or need a bathroom or am in pain, reminds me of something else I learned when researching walking: the hominin fossil record has many examples of people with various disabilities, whether from injury or birth, being valued and fully equal members of their communities. The weight of scientific evidence points to the reality that we evolved to be interdependent, and to care for one another—a reality innate to our development, not an offshoot of it. The more recent proposition that humans evolved to be individualistic and competitive is contradicted by millions of years of hominin history.

I was more than happy to come back home, catch up on sleep (and a backlog of laundry, homework, and decaying food in the fridge), go for a walk with a couple of close friends and another longer walk by myself, and coddle my aggrieved knee. But getting out and meeting people, slowing down and walking with them instead of corresponding over texts and emails, brought me back to what this is all about, the writing, the walking, the living, the multi-dimensional relating, the negotiating of physical and emotional needs: it’s about one another, and how we manage to live, and walk, together.

We exist. It’s a miracle. Time is vast, our lives are brief. Remember: you are marvelous.

*There is a particular angle the knee develops in upright walking, called a bicondylar angle, a tilt in the femur caused by downward pressure as babies start to walk. Jerry DeSilva wrote about these details, and his work with Lucy and many other hominin fossils, in his excellent book First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human.

This sky! Philly, you beauty.

This counts

March 10, 2024by Antonia MalchikLeave a Comment

The chickadees have been singing again and it’s time to order seed potatoes and onion starts. The year has barely had time to rub sleep from her eyes, and the frozen peaches are not even dented by my hunger for their winter warmth, and I feel like I just got the potatoes stored away in the paper bags and moderate temperature that seems to have—mostly—succeeded in keeping them edible through the winter.

How can it already be time to think of choosing carrot and lettuce seeds, of where to plant beets and how to make more room for green beans, of the soil’s stirrings and the young yawns of growing things in my garden? It might be months, still, before I can visit the sweetgrass and turn the soil, but it is time, already, in the midst of this winter, to be planning for the next.

I was away most of last week committed to what I’lll broadly call parental duties, long hours of chaperoning, most of which took place in the confines of a hotel my kid and I rarely left. By the time the commitment was done, my body felt stunned from lack of movement. I spent two hours on Monday walking through town and along the river trails, relieved at the sight of water, the freedom to wander, the flurry of chickadee-company, and the surprise of what might be a new construction along the riverbank.

The drive home had been painstakingly slow, through hours of fog that seems to mark most of this winter’s personality. I hadn’t seen Moon at all for what feels like weeks until three nights ago, moonglow through the fog, Her bright self mostly hidden from the skies I live under until the dark, dreamy hours of this morning.

I watched Her there for an hour, remembering what moonfall feels like and ignoring my usual routines. A few hours later, on our way to school, She was cast slight pink in the pre-dawn sunlight that crept out from behind the mountains.

Who else, I wondered, might be watching that alpenglow wrap itself around Moon?

Why put all those words and observations on a page, why share them with you? What is this human urge to story? To shape the narratives we see around us, to call attention to beauty and comprehend grief? Why write?

I’ve seen this question lobbed about since I was old enough to understand the concept of philosophy, if not philosophy itself. What is the compulsion to create? Why do we care so much?

I don’t have any better answers than anyone else. All I know is that I become a grumpy, unpleasant person when I don’t write. It’s a compulsion. It’s joyous and beautiful, to be lost in a narrative, but it’s also demanding and ruthless. Writing left me once for a few months, just flat walked out the door. I had thought that if that ever happened, if I couldn’t create, I would feel bereft. I thought I wouldn’t know myself. But what I felt was free. I kept thinking of all the things I could do with my life now that I weren’t driven to shape them into narrative of some kind.

Writing came back after about three months of that release, as if wandering through the door after an argument: “I just went for a walk. Needed some air.” And there we were again, back in a lifelong need to story, to do whatever it is that happens between my interaction with the world I exist in and the way my mind—or whatever it is—decides those experiences and thoughts should sound, feel, taste.

Writing is very, very weird.

The novelist Elif Shafak wrote recently of a 16-year-old girl in Afghanistan who loved to read, who dreamed of libraries and pizza and of meeting Shafak herself after reading one of her novels, and who was killed by a suicide bomber.

“I am tired of being attacked and stigmatised and labelled by fanatics and zealots and ultranationalists only because I am a writer,” wrote Shafak.

“But when I feel so down and despondent, I think of Marzia and I think of every other aspiring novelist and aspiring poet in the world who were never given even half the chances that were provided to me throughout my life: books, bicycle, pizza, electricity . . . I will never belittle any of these.

I have no doubt that Marzia would have become an amazing storyteller if only she had been encouraged and if only her life had not been brutally taken away from her. I feel like all of us in the writing community owe something deep and precious to all the Marzias on this planet. We owe them a sincere commitment to literature.”

Writing is weird but it’s also necessary and it exists far beyond any arbitrary measures of success and failure. I’ve written before of my stepmother’s great-aunt, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, and her life that knew little but hardship and brutal loss, and how throughout it she wrote poetry so meaningful and beloved that to this day there are museums dedicated to her all across the country.

At the end of my life, all I can ask for is that I’ve done the best work possible and used whatever skills and talents I’m fortunate enough to have to create something of beauty and meaning. Maybe one book, one essay, one single line, might reach the one person who really needs it.

“It is as simple and as powerful as that,” wrote Shafak.

“The love of books and libraries and the joy of reading. This is all we need. This is why we keep on writing.”

There’s something more, too: that delight and spark that Marzia knew reading and writing held for her, the world-opening potential of stories that I remember feeling at her age.

I think many of us write because we can’t help it, because it’s a jealous lover or a hunger that can’t be sated or whatever metaphor works for you. When that leaves us, even if it’s only for a while, we still have what’s left: we write for one another. And what a gift that is. Stories can break empires; they can tell our hearts we’re not alone. They make us laugh. They make us grateful to be alive.

It’s been foggy and somewhat rainy for days and days, but today the cold was biting again. I didn’t dress warmly enough and my fingers were numb by the time I dropped off my kid at school.

As I was turning away from the building, blowing on my hands, I saw a cluster of ten-year-olds, their pom-pom hats wobbling as they turned, ignoring the school bell to send frosty breath up toward a bald eagle soaring low overhead.

The crossing guard watched, and me, too, and we smiled at each other, and I held close the gratitude I always feel at the sight, at watching children hold their breath because they see a bald eagle and they know. You pause for such birds. The soul bows. And I hold the knowledge I wish these kids never to have, that my gratitude is weighted with the knowledge that bald eagles were almost extinct when I was growing up.

High on the mountainsides just outside of town, the first light of dawn brushed the snow, the same light that was coaxing alpenglow from Moon. A flurry of snow rose in the light, over three thousand feet above me, and I wondered which of those sunshot flakes will be the first to meet spring’s young strawberries.

I received a surprise care package this week from a friend who knew I’d been going through some difficult personal things recently. Among tea and a kind note were two books of poetry. This poem, titled “Not This,” by Olena Kalytiak Davis, appears in one of them, The World Has Need of You: Poems for Connection, and I keep rereading it, finding something new to catch my thoughts each time.