Southeast Asian Ecocriticism: Theories, Practices, Prospects
Edited by John Ryan. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017
Southeast Asian Ecocriticism presents a timely exploration of the rapidly expanding field of ecocriticism through its devotion to the writers, creators, theorists, traditions, concerns, and landscapes of Southeast Asian countries. While ecocritics have begun to turn their attention to East and South Asian contexts and, particularly, to Chinese and Indian cultural productions, less emphasis has been placed on the diverse environmental traditions of Southeast Asia. Building on recent scholarship in Asian ...
Plants in Contemporary Poetry: Ecocriticism and the Botanical Imagination
By John Ryan. New York: Routledge, 2017.
https://www.routledge.com/Plants-in-Contemporary-Poetry-Ecocriticism-and-the-Botanical-Imagination/Ryan/p/book/9781138186286
Positioned within current ecocritical scholarship, this volume is the first book-length study of the representations of plants in contemporary American, English, and Australian poetry. Through readings of botanically-minded writers including Les Murray, Louise Glück, and Alice Oswald, it addresses the relationship between language and the subjectivity, agency, sentience, consciousness, and intelligence of vegetal life. Scientific, philosophical, and literary frameworks enable the author to develop an interdisciplinary approach to examining ...
Branches Over Ripples: A Waterside Journal
By Brian Bartlett. Kentville, Nova Scotia: Gaspereau Press, 2017.Over two years, Canadian poet and amateur naturalist Brian Bartlett sat down beside various bodies of water (bays, rivers, streams, lakes, marshes, vernal ponds, waterfalls) to record his impressions, capturing both sensuous details of natural phenomena and reflections on his life and reading. Making a virtue of leisurely digression, Bartlett’s experiment in plein-air writing wanders beyond everyday personal journal-keeping into a meditation on the rich connections between the seemingly disparate experiences of ...
The Bunch Grass Motel: The Collected Poems of Randall Gloege
Edited by Bernard Quetchenbach. Missoula, MT: University of Montana Press
Randall Gloege, a retired professor of English at MSU Billings, died in 2013 at the age of 78. This marvelous volume, The Bunch Grass Motel, was edited by his colleague Bernard Quetchenbach, with a Foreword written by a former student (Cathy Ulrich), an Introduction by another colleague (William Kamowski), and an Afterword by one of Gloege’s “wilderness” friends (Howie Wolke).
Ken Egan, Humanities Montana, and author ...
Accidental Gravity
By Bernard Quetchenbach. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2017.
The compelling essays in Bernard Quetchenbach’s Accidental Gravity move from upstate New York to the western United States, from urban and suburban places to wild lands. In the first section of the book, he focuses on suburban neighborhoods, where residents respond ambivalently to golf-course geese and other unruly natural presences; in the second section, he juxtaposes these humanized places with Yellowstone National Park. Quetchenbach writes about current environmental issues in the Greater Yellowstone ...
Anthropocene Blues: Poems
By John Lane. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2017
In the story of the earth, geologists tell us that around 12,000 years ago the planet shifted from the Pleistocene to the Holocene. There probably were poets to sing about that change, but of what they sang, we have no records. Even earlier, paintings on cave walls point toward an artistic response from our upstart species. These early artists painted the Pleistocene’s last great ice age herds thundering past.
Now John Lane’s traveling geologist ...