Member Bookshelf

By Jeffery Bilbro. University Press of Kentucky. December 2018. 

For over fifty years, Wendell Berry has argued that our most pressing ecological and cultural need is a renewed formal intelligence—a mode of thinking and acting that fosters the health of the earth and its beings. Yet the present industrial economy prioritizes a technical, self-centered way of relating to the world that often demands and rewards busyness over thoughtful observation, independence over relationships, and replacing over repairing. Such a system is both unsustainable and results ...

By Susan Scott Parrish. Princeton University Press. January 2017. 

Honorable Mention for the James Russell Lowell Prize, Modern Language Association.

The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which covered nearly thirty thousand square miles across seven states, was the most destructive river flood in U.S. history. Due to the speed of new media and the slow progress of the flood, this was the first environmental disaster to be experienced on a mass scale. As it moved from north to south down an environmentally and technologically altered valley, ...

By Mary Newell. Codhill Press. January 2019. 

Pivoting around the modular refrain “in the pith of,” the poetry chapbook TILT / HOVER / VEER depicts moments such as the planetary tilt that “shuffles the seasons,” the dynamic poise of a bird hovering, the tendency to veer as we “aim for the polestar” but “wake up awry,” and the opportunity to recover a vital orientation in the midst of life’s fluctuations.

“Newell’s pithy fragments capture the essence of fleeting moments in time, whole worlds of weather, ...

By Susan Schmidt. Library Partners Press. November 2018. 

In Let Go or Hold Fast, Beaufort Poems (Library Partners Press/ Gail O’Day 2018 Prize). Susan Schmidt celebrates neighbors in her small town—dolphins, manatees, sharks, herons, egrets, butterflies, ants, bees, possum, snake, owl, and bear. As she swims, paddles, rows, sand ails, she witnesses coastal diversity and resilience, threatened by sea level rise, development, motorboat wakes, tourists. As sailboat captain, master gardener, and Quaker naturalist, Schmidt is a keen observer. The newest poem describes Hurricane Florence’s damage, ...

By Scott T. Starbuck and Guy Denning. Fomite Press: Burlington, VT. 2018. 

Carbonfish Blues has 78 poems by Scott T. Starbuck, and 12 art works by Guy Denning of activism, refugees, human vulnerability, and realism known throughout Europe.

The Kindle price is $4.99.

This book is about the war planetary life is losing to oil companies, and an appeal to all to help reverse this while we can. The text reports local and global scenes of climate breakdown most affecting the silenced least responsible. Thomas Jefferson’s ...

By Luis I. Prádanos (Iñaki). Liverpool University Press. 2018

This book brings together environmental cultural studies and postgrowth economics to examine counterhegemonic narratives and radical cultural shifts sparked by the global financial crisis of 2008. A number of critical voices worldwide have emphasized that in the context of a finite biosphere, constant economic growth is a biophysical impossibility. The problem is not a lack of growth but rather the globalization of an economic system addicted to constant growth, which destroys the ecological planetary systems that ...

By Nicole Seymour. University of Minnesota Press. 2018. 

Traces a tradition of ironic and irreverent environmentalism, asking us to rethink the movement’s reputation for gloom and doom.

Nicole Seymour develops the concept of “bad environmentalism”: cultural thought that employs dissident affects and sensibilities to reflect critically on our current moment and on mainstream environmental activism. Funny and original, Bad Environmentalism champions the practice of alternative green politics and expands our understanding of how environmental art and activism can be pleasurable, even in a time of ...

Edited by Jennifer Ladino and Kyle Bladow. University of Nebraska Press. 2018. 

Jennifer Ladino and Kyle Bladow have published a collection of essays, Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment, with the University of Nebraska Press. The book compiles fourteen original essays that take an interdisciplinary approach to the study of affect and emotion in regard to a variety of primary texts, including short story collections, films, poetry, curricular programs, and contentious sites such as Canada’s Tar Sands. Co-editors Ladino and Bladow wrote the book’s introduction, ...

By Julia Corbett. University of Nevada Press. 2018.

Have you ever wondered about society’s desire to cultivate the perfect lawn, why we view some animals as “good” and some as “bad,” or even thought about the bits of nature inside everyday items–toothbrushes, cell phones, and coffee mugs? In this fresh and introspective collection of essays, Julia Corbett examines nature in our lives with all of its ironies and contradictions by seamlessly integrating personal narratives with morsels of highly digestible science and research. Each story ...