Excerpt from “The Sparrow”, by Mary Doria Russell:

“And so he turned his aesthetic sensibilities to the experience of orgasm and found the courage to sing of that evanescent moment which, for the fertile, brings the weight of the past to bear on the future, which holds all moments in its embrace, which links ancestry and posterity in the chain of being from which he was barred and exiled. With his poetry, he severed that moment from the stream of genetic history, carried it beyond the body’s drive to reproduce and the lineal need for continuity and, focusing the mind and soul on it, discovered in climax a reservoir of piercing erotic beauty no one else in the history of his kind had suspected.”

Photos by Alan Sailer.