The Bison Constellation by Alexander Beeching

Just the other day, a few of us—it's Sara here—realized we missed the peak of Perseids meteor shower. Living under the relentless glow of NYC's twenty-four hours of light and perpetually pink and hazy sky, not one of us had seen a single falling, firey particle. (Unless we can be like Hayley Williams and pretend that airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars.) The youngest among us admitted that the last time he saw Perseids was THREE YEARS AGO (a travesty!) when he was at a "hippie school," in California. I was pretty sure the only stars that I'd glimpsed from this fair city were actually planets and when I last laid eyes on the Milky Way, I too, was far out West. Our late-summer conversation was apropos to today's edition from Alexander Beeching, The Bison Constellation.

It's kind-of a sad thing, this lack of site-seeing overhead here—one that I think haunts us all, a little bit. The citiest-city-girl I've ever met, Jen, implored the Twitterverse to look at the moon a few nights back. But even then, chances were that you'd only see the luminescent globe if you had roof access or lived near a park. Still, it doesn't keep us from thinking about what else is out there—those thousands of years of dust—and remembering that what we can't see doesn't cease to exist. We strive to define what we can see; we name it and make it our own so that we can take these intangible, and often unfathomable things and somehow make them real. It's how we deal with entities both greater and smaller than we are, those as concrete—as Alex writes in his statement—as tables, and as abstract as constellations.

As he did with his nearly sold-out edition of The Constellation of the Elephant, Alex took a semi-mythological animal and created his own celestial grouping—The Bison Constellation, giving the weighty beast a place in the heavens. In doing so, he took a small, fictional piece of the sky and made it into something we could all live with and look at, wherever we may be.