–KL Dunn
I love fish. They are weird, ancient, and impervious to our attempts to explain them. They glow in the dark, walk on land, survive pressures that would crush us, and disappear into depths we can barely imagine. The deeper we look, the stranger they become.
What links Lulu Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist, Lars Horn’s Voice of the Fish, Sabrina Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches, and Joseph Osmundson’s Spawning Season is not fish, though fish are everywhere. Nor is it identity, though identity drifts through their pages. What links them is a radical act of attention. Each begins with the assumption that another life is not merely material for human meaning, but something worth encountering on its own irreducible terms.
And while that sounds simple, it isn’t. I learned that lesson from a fish. Or rather, from a paragraph about one.
Picture a teenager in a small, pre-internet Michigan town, reading their way toward a larger world. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando lay dog-eared beside D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. My best friend and I skipped school for Wednesday foreign films, disappearing into dark theaters to watch Visconti, Fassbinder, Bertolucci—all that gorgeous longing and constraint pressed flat against the inside of the screen. We were fluent in subtext before we had any text at all.
Then one day, I stumbled across an account of parrotfish in an obscure biology text. A species that changes sex during their lifetime, responding to social and environmental conditions.
That parrotfish refused to be pinned down. I felt that refusal as a seismic relief. Life was strange and inventive, unstable and improvisational; it resisted the neat categories my formal education had taught me to expect.
Lulu Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist
begins with a man who believed everything could be sorted into its proper place. A pioneering ichthyologist and founding president of Stanford University, David Starr Jordan devoted his life to collecting, naming, and classifying fish. Earthquakes repeatedly destroyed his collections. Again and again he rebuilt them, sewing labels back onto specimens and restoring order. At first Miller admires this persistence, but as the book unfolds Jordan’s faith in order turns out to be connected to darker beliefs — specifically eugenics, and a conviction that the world can be neatly organized, ranked, and controlled. What started as a search for a hero becomes an inquiry into the costs of that desire for certainty.
Current science upends such hierarchies, for it turns out that “fish” — as a category — doesn’t actually exist. The creatures we group under that word share no common ancestor that isn’t also the ancestor of every land vertebrate, including us. A cow is more closely related to a salmon than a lungfish is. “Fish” is a folk category, a convenience, not a natural one. The title, Why Fish Don’t Exist?, is less a scientific claim than an invitation to consider what else we might have mistaken for permanence.
Miller’s own queerness enters the narrative as a consequence of this unraveling. What she finds on the other side of all that shattered classification is fluidity.
Lars Horn’s Voice of the Fish
approaches uncertainty from another direction. Part lyric essay, part meditation, part prayer, the book drifts through aquariums, theology, memory, and marine life. It coalesces — vignettes about aquatic species, fragments of myth and Catholic faith, episodes from a trans life lived across several countries and languages — and the cumulative effect is of an argument forming underwater, where light bends and disorients. You are drawn along a current that eddies and occasionally deposits you on rocks.
Horn’s creatures resist interpretation. Greenland sharks circle arctic waters for centuries. Ancient sturgeon entered the fossil record 150 million years ago and are still sliding through rivers now.
Some species move between sexes across a lifetime; others sidestep the question entirely, operating on evolutionary scales that again render human categories irrelevant. What Horn finds in these bodies is a permission to remain opaque, to treat mystery as a form of integrity. Horn describes aquatic life as “holding questions more than yielding answers” and identifies that quality not as a lack, but as something specifically, quietly trans.
Sabrina Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches
similarly builds on a structural conceit that skirts the edge of allegory. Ten essays, each centered on a sea creature, are braided with the author’s own life as a nonbinary, mixed-race writer. What keeps the collection from collapsing into easy metaphor is Imbler’s insistence on taking these animals seriously on their own terms before asking what they mean to a human consciousness.
A feral goldfish released into the wild doesn’t simply represent resilience; it actively overruns river systems, grows monstrous, and rewrites ecosystems. A mother octopus brooding her eggs for four years without eating is not a symbol of devotion but a biological creature whose specific, grueling life is worth knowing entirely beyond the human gaze. Organisms thriving at hydrothermal vents do not stand in for marginalized survival; they are ancient creatures that abandoned the sunlit world entirely and built something in the dark that can not be fully known.
The resonance in Imbler’s work emerges from raw biological specificity. Through this lens, they make a discovery that feels confessional: they extend more tenderness toward a struggling fish than toward past versions of themselves. The animal lens strips away social judgment to find the vulnerable organism underneath. Ultimately, these creatures are not secretly human, and we are all the richer for abandoning humanity as the metric of all things.
Joseph Osmundson’s Spawning Season
turns to salmon, which Osmundson contends is the perfect fish for thinking about grief. The book chronicles his journey toward and then away from parenthood: a queer family-making arrangement with a lesbian couple that came apart along fault lines of race and whiteness. What does one do with a grief that has no body, no ceremony, no recognized form — that exists in the space between what was wanted and what the world would allow? Osmundson goes to the river, where loss is embedded into its very ecology.
Pacific salmon migrate hundreds of miles upstream, spawn, and die; their decomposing bodies return nutrients captured in the ocean back into the river ecosystem, feeding everything that comes after. This is not deployed as consolation, but as a structural fact about what bodies do with loss. Osmundson had wanted to be pregnant since childhood. This want sits in the book without apology or explanation. “I could only grieve what I’ve heard scream,” he writes, “and she didn’t have a mouth until she became a fish.” The fish gave grief a body; the body gave grief somewhere to live. What the salmon offers is not hope exactly, but the possibility that what gets spent in grief doesn’t disappear. It becomes a nutrient for something that grows without you.
Real fish are always wilder than metaphors—and reading these four books together upends the human in ecological time.
At a recent roundtable conversation among all four authors, Lulu Miller described how the monocle bream, a tiny fish, will risk its own life to warn a neighbor of a predator lying in wait. Scientists regard this as gene-preserving selfishness. Miller refutes this. She sees a small creature who does not run past danger but stops, cocks its head, and risks death for its neighbor. “Maybe demagogues don’t hold all the power,” she writes. “Yes, they prey on fear. But there is prey who does not always obey fear.”
That last sentence belongs to this moment. When queerness in America is under legislative assault, when the existence of trans people is being actively contested by the state, when pride requires courage rather than just celebration, it makes sense to think beyond the human scale and into geologic time. The living world has been running this experiment for eons before we crawled out of the waters. The Greenland shark has been circling the North Atlantic for centuries. The bowhead whale has been alive through our wars, elections, and catastrophes. The sturgeons entered the fossil record 150 million years ago and still swim in the Great Lakes near my old home.
Experiments in queerness, in fluidity, in non-binary embodiment, and in family structures that don’t map onto any prior template are the natural order. The philosopher Timothy Morton calls other species “strange strangers.” No matter how much we learn about them, something remains forever beyond us. I find that irreducible and perhaps the most radical gift the living world has to offer us right now: the reminder that reality is always stranger than our descriptions of it, that wonder is not the elimination of mystery but learning how to live inside it, and that we are not, and have never been, the only experiment worth running on this planet.
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