The Warm Hands of Ghosts

by Katherine Arden

Armageddon was a fire in the harbor, a box delivered on a cold day. It wasn’t one great tragedy, but ten million tiny ones, and everyone faced theirs alone.

“There’s nothing noble about suffering. It’s an ugly, petty, crawling business.

It was the poet’s alchemy, to seize the intangible or unspeakable and drag it, real, into the living world.