The Ecopoetics of Entanglement in Contemporary Turkish and American Literatures
The Ecopoetics of Entanglement in Contemporary Turkish and American Literatures By Meliz Ergin. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
This book foregrounds entanglement as a guiding concept in Derrida’s work and considers its implications and benefits for ecocritical thought. Ergin introduces the notion of “ecological text” to emphasize textuality as a form of entanglement that proves useful in thinking about ecological interdependence and uncertainty. She brings deconstruction into a dialogue with social ecology and new materialism, outlining entanglements in three strands of thought to demonstrate the relevance of ...
Mississippi: Poems Ann Fisher-Wirth & Photography Maude Schuyler Clay
Mississippi By Ann Fisher-Wirth and Maude Schuyler Clay. Wings Press, 2018.
Mississippi is Ann Fisher-Wirth’s fifth book of poems; it is a poetry/photography collaboration with the acclaimed Delta photographer Maude Schuyler Clay. Mississippi suffers from severe environmental degradation that cannot be separated from its history of poverty and racial oppression. Yet, the state also possesses great natural beauty and a rich and complex culture, one interwoven from the many voices that have made up its identity. Mississippi explores both this degradation and this beauty. The poems are ...
Sushi in Cortez: Interdisciplinary Essays on Mesa Verde
Sushi in Cortez: Interdisciplinary Essays on Mesa Verde Edited by David Taylor and Steve Wolverton. University of Utah Press, 2015.
The Mesa Verde region is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world and is an area fraught with complexities, anomalies, and layers of histories. Sushi in Cortez is a collection of essays by an interdisciplinary group of academics, artists, and cultural observers that explores this diverse landscape and heritage by combining and sharing the differing perspectives provided by various disciplines. Poetry, film, environmental philosophy, nature photography, ...
Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature
By Cajetan Iheka. Cambridge University Press, 2017.
The problem of environmental degradation on the African continent is a severe one. In Naturalizing Africa, Cajetan Iheka analyses how African literary texts have engaged with pressing ecological problems in Africa, including the Niger Delta oil pollution in Nigeria, ecologies of war in Somalia, and animal abuses. Analysing narratives by important African writers such as Amos Tutuola, Wangari Maathai, J. M. Coetzee, Bessie Head, and Ben Okri, Iheka ...
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 ...