Peregrinations
By Amy T. Hamilton. University of Nevada Press. 2018.
Peregrinate: To travel or wander around from place to place.
The land of the United States is defined by vast distances encouraging human movement and migration on a grand scale. Consequently, American stories are filled with descriptions of human bodies walking through the land.
In Peregrinations, Amy T. Hamilton examines stories told by and about Indigenous American, Euroamerican, and Mexican walkers. Walking as a central experience that ties these texts together—never simply a metaphor or allegory—offers storytellers ...
Mayilamma: The Life of a Tribal Eco-warrior
By Jothibai Pariyadath. Translators: Swarnalatha Rangarajan and Sreejith Varma. Orient Blackswan. July 2018.
Winner of the 2015 ASLE Translation Grant.
Mayilamma (1940–2007) was an illiterate adivasi woman whose iconic leadership of her community against the unrestrained extraction and pollution of water by Coca-Cola put the nondescript village of Plachimada on the Kerala-Tamil Nadu border on the global map of environmental activism.
Mayilamma: Oru Jeevitham maps the rise of eco-activism in Kerala alongside the realities of consumption, globalisation, widening socio-economic inequalities and the rising ecological burdens borne ...
Whispers from the Aural World
By Karolyn Redoute. Plain View Press. April 30th, 2018.
These poems explore listening to the silences, weaving in and out of nature and the psyche. There are images from the ravaged neighborhoods of Detroit, to the landscapes of August moons, the open spaces of raptors and flight, and the solace of those who ask questions of the ocean.
“Shells, ears, damaged mirrors… the images in Karolyn Redoute’s powerful new book, Whispers from the Aural World, conjure a mysterious emotional landscape that ...
Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields
By Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Steven Rubin. Penn State University Press. August, 2018
“Rarely have I read a work that so strongly, profoundly, and empathically characterizes the history of a region through those who have labored hardest to make a decent life in a beautiful yet ravaged land.” —Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of Stairway to Heaven
In Shale Play, acclaimed poet Julia Spicher Kasdorf and award-winning documentary photographer Steven Rubin explore the small towns, farms, and forests of Appalachian Pennsylvania to gather the stories ...
The Ecophobia Hypothesis
By Simon C. Estok. Routledge. June, 2018.
Winner of the “Writing in the Humanities Book Award” from the National Research Foundation, Korea.
The Ecophobia Hypothesis grows out of the sense that while the theory of biophilia has productively addressed ideal human affinities with nature, the capacity of “the biophilia hypothesis” as an explanatory model of human/ environment relations is limited. The biophilia hypothesis cannot adequately account for the kinds of things that are going on in the world, things so extraordinary that we are increasingly ...
Every Day We Live Is The Future: Surviving in a City of Disasters
Every Day We Live Is the Future: Surviving in a City of Disasters.
By Douglas Haynes. University of Texas Press, 2017.
When she was only nine, Dayani Baldelomar left her Nicaraguan village with nothing more than a change of clothes. She was among tens of thousands of rural migrants to Managua in the 1980s and 1990s. After years of homelessness, Dayani landed in a shantytown called The Widows, squeezed between a drainage ditch and toxic Lake Managua. Her neighbor, Yadira Castellón, also migrated from the mountains. ...
Writing for Animals: New perspectives for writers and instructors to educate and inspire
Writing for Animals: New perspectives for writers and instructors to educate and inspire.
Editor John Yunker. Ashland Creek Press. August, 2018.
A unique anthology of articles and essays to inspire animal-themed creative writing.
Despite all we know about the sentience of animals, society tends to view and treat nonhuman animals as lesser creatures. And for society to change its views, writers must change their views.
This book helps writers rethink their approach to animals, from crafting point of view to giving animals realistic voices. This collection of ...
Fire and Snow: Climate Fiction from the Inklings to Game of Thrones
Fire and Snow: Climate Fiction from the Inklings to Game of Thrones. By Marc DiPaolo. State University of New York Press. 2018.
A broad examination of climate fantasy and science fiction, from The Lord of the Rings and the Narnia series to The Handmaid’s Tale and Game of Thrones.
Fellow Inklings J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis may have belonged to different branches of Christianity, but they both made use of a faith-based environmentalist ethic to counter the mid-twentieth-century’s triple threats of fascism, ...
Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by Mark C. Long and Sean Ross Meehan. New York: Modern Language Association, 2018.
A leader of the transcendentalist movement and one of the country’s first public intellectuals, Ralph Waldo Emerson has been a long-standing presence in American literature courses. Today he is remembered for his essays, but in the nineteenth century he was also known as a poet and orator who engaged with issues such as religion, nature, education, and abolition.
This volume presents strategies for placing ...
A Feast of Fools
A Feast of Fools. By Terry Gifford. Blaenau Ffestiniog, UK, Cinnamon Press, 2018.
Who are the fools in our world of climate change? Certainly the author, he admits, in this seriously playful, long-awaited eighth collection. Terry Gifford’s poems wryly celebrate people both joyously at home in their landscapes and slightly uneasy about what is happening around them. The first section, ‘Flights of the Fool’, is culled from fifteen years of travels, geographical and emotional. In the second section the Fool is in his village ...