There Are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral
By Elizabeth Jacobson. Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2025.
As the title intimates, There Are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral, a variety of distinct voices sing in this new poetry collection, often expressing the complicated, rapidly fluctuating truths of our heating planet, family function and dysfunction, and the surprising reflections that emerge from a continuous practice of paying attention to the self, society and the greater wild world. These poems work to dispel delusion, empowering the reader to fully witness ...
The Butterfly Who Dreamt He Was a Man: Metamorphoses, Entomological and Human
By Boria Sax. Reaktion Books, 2025.
From ancient fables to modern science, insects and their metamorphoses have long inspired human understanding of life’s transitions. This original and engaging book traces how these transformations have shaped rituals around birth, marriage, and death, while also provoking deep questions about identity. Through stories that connect Zhuang Zhou’s butterfly dream to figures like Kafka, Merian, and Dürer, it explores the strange, beautiful, and sometimes unsettling ways cultures have understood insects—as miracles, messengers, or monsters. Blending humor, history, and ...
Accidental Gardens: New & Revised
By Rob Carney. Wakefield Press, 2025.
There is a centuries-old Japanese form of writing called the haibun: meditative narratives ending with a haiku that acts as a summary or extension of the ideas and moods in the prose. In Accidental Gardens: New & Revised, Rob Carney both honors this form and gives it an update for the 21st century. These 48 essays—including 16 collected for the first time in this new edition—are all short and end, haibun-style, with poems or encapsulating images. These essays ...
Alaska Literary Field Guide
Edited by Nancy Lord, Marybeth Holleman, & Sharlene Grace Moler. Mountaineers Books, 2026.
Alaska Literary Field Guide is a vibrant and immersive celebration of Alaska’s wild beauty, blending science, storytelling, and stunning artwork. This unique anthology brings together a diverse range of the state’s most respected contemporary poets and writers alongside original, full-color artwork from 19 Alaskan visual artists. More than 90 species and natural elements—from grizzly bears and glaciers to lichens, loons, and the aurora borealis—are brought to life through poetic reflections, vivid ...
The Season of Birds and Stones: Essays
By Yelizaveta P. Renfro. University of Georgia Press, 2026.
The essays that make up The Season of Birds and Stones grapple with questions of what wilderness means and how we can interact with and learn from other species. Set in some of our most stunning public lands, including Denali National Park and Preserve, Great Basin National Park, Isle Royale National Park, and Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park, Renfro’s essays examine her encounters with bears, arctic ground squirrels, loons, red-winged blackbirds, moose, and wolves, as ...
Teaching with Science Writing in the Humanities Classroom
Editors: Allison Dushane, Lisa Ottum, Rosalind Powell. Modern Language Association, 2026.
Science writing is an expansive genre that invites collaborations between the humanities and science—not as separate endeavors but as mutually constitutive practices. Engaging with long-standing scholarly conversations in science and technology studies, literature and science, rhetoric, and science communication, the essays in Teaching with Science Writing in the Humanities Classroom showcase the value of science writing as a mode of cultural analysis, as an object of close reading, and as a foundation for ...
The Bird Church
By Marisol Cortez. Finishing Line Press, 2025.
Written in the years after returning home to South Texas, The Bird Church tends to the urban microfauna—the grackles, koi, chicharras, cosmos, feral parrots, snoutnosed butterflies, but also the ornamental fruit and children—which persist in the unsupervised scars of highways and inland refineries. Less a poetry of witness than of attention, The Bird Church considers “what is here”: the ordinary life that persists and survives amid the occupations of colonial history and its current climate and political ...
Leafskin
By Miranda Schmidt. Stillhouse Press, 2025.
Miranda Schmidt’s lyrical debut novel blurs the boundaries between poetry and prose, human and nonhuman, reality and magic. A tale of queer love, new motherhood, and ecological interconnectedness, Leafskin interrogates how we create, and what we become, in a time of environmental devastation.
A poet and her husband have been trying to make a baby. But while undergoing fertility treatments in the midst of a harrowing wildfire season, Jo reconsiders raising a child in a time of climate crisis. ...
“Alaska” Is Not a Blank Space: Unsettling Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey
By Julianne Warren. Cambridge Elements series in Indigenous Environmental Research, 2025.
“Alaska” Is Not a Blank Space: Unsettling Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey supports Gwich’in, Iñupiat, and all Alaska Natives’ collective continuance and reparative justice from the perspective of a settler in the traditional territories of lower Tanana Dene Peoples. It stands with Alaska Natives’ recovering and safe-keeping: kinships obstructed by settler-colonialism; ontologies and languages inseparable from land-relations and incommensurable with English-language perspectives; and epistemologies not beholden to any colonialist standard. These rights and responsibilities clash ...
Bloom Again
By Marybeth Holleman. University of Alaska Press, 2025.
Bloom Again is a novel that unfolds the story of two women whose seemingly fulfilling lives are shaken by environmental catastrophe, leading them to changes that reverberate into a shared, but forgotten, past.
Weaving together sophisticated literary narrative and characters, evocative travel and nature writing, and effective and reliable depictions of climate change crises in parts of the world underrepresented in mainstream literary fiction, Bloom Again is a realistic work of eco/climate fiction (cli-fi) about Elyse, an ...