Member Bookshelf

The Nature of Modernism: Ecocritical Approaches to the Poetry of Edward Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell and Charlotte Mew

By Elizabeth Black. Routledge: New York and London, 2017.

The Nature of Modernism presents the first extended study of the relationship between British modernist poetry and the environment. Challenging reductive associations of modernism as predominantly anthropocentric in character and urban in focus, the book’s central argument is that within British modernist poetry there is a clear and sustained interest in the natural world which has yet ...

Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel

By Astrid Bracke. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, Environmental Cultures Series, 2017.

The challenge of rapid climate change is forcing us to rethink traditional attitudes to nature. This book is the first study to chart these changing attitudes in 21st-century British fiction. Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel examines twelve works that reflect growing cultural awareness of climate crisis and participate in the reshaping of the stories that surround it. Central to this renegotiation are four narratives: environmental collapse, pastoral, ...

The Spiral Jetty Encylo: Exploring Robert Smithson’s Earthwork through Time and Place By Hikmet Sidney Loe. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2017. Copublished with the Tanner Trust Fund, J. Willard Marriott Library. (from the press’ website):  Robert Smithson’s earthwork, Spiral Jetty (1970), an icon of the Land Art movement of the 1960s and 1970s, is located on the northern shores of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Smithson built a masterpiece from local materials, one that spirals counterclockwise into the lake and appears or is submerged with ...

Piano Tide

By Kathleen Dean Moore. Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2016

Piano Tide has been awarded the 2017 WILLA Award for Creative Nonfiction, from the literary organization, Women Writing the West. The book was also a finalist for the 2017 ASLE Environmental Creative Book Award.

Piano Tide is the debut novel by award-winning naturalist, philosopher, activist, and author Kathleen Dean Moore. Set in coastal Alaska, the book tells the “savagely funny” story of a town’s transformative act of resistance to corporate plunder, as the townsfolk stand up for what they ...

In the Gorge

By Brandon Krieg. New Paltz, NY: Codhill Press, 2017.

Codhill Poetry Award Winner 2016

In Brandon Krieg’s stunning collection In the Gorge, we are placed on a tightrope, balancing the leisure of Western society against the survival of the natural world. Here, nature and human lunge and parry, conjoined twins in a struggle to the death. Krieg reminds us that our manufactured beauty is part of the planet-wide tableau—“looking down from an overpass / looking up through the canopy / the contrails the sunset / ...

Undermined in Coal Country: On the Measures in a Working Land

By Bill Conlogue. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017.

Deep mining ended decades ago in Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna Valley. The barons who made their fortunes have moved on. Low wages and high unemployment haunt the area, and the people left behind wonder whether to stay or seek their fortunes elsewhere.

Undermined in Coal Country explores how two overlapping coal country landscapes—Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Marywood University—have coped with the devastating aftermath of mining. Examining the far-reaching environmental ...

Ecocriticism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation

By Serenella Iovino. London: Bloomsbury, 2016.

Winner of the American Association for Italian Studies Book Prize for 2016

Ecocriticism and Italy reads the diverse landscapes of Italy in the cultural imagination. From death in Venice as a literary trope and petrochemical curse, through the volcanoes of Naples to wine, food and environmental violence in Piedmont, Serenella Iovino explores Italy as a text where ecology and imagination meet. Examining texts where justice, society and politics interlace with stories of land ...

Tree Lines

By Valerie P. Cohen and Michael P. Cohen. Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press, 2017.

Tree Lines unites striking ink drawings of high-altitude pine trees with poetic vignettes about how people interact with mountain environments. The drawings and text work together to form a direct artistic encounter with timberline conifers. The husband and wife team of Valerie and Michael Cohen employ a unique process whereby she draws in isolation, gives him her drawings, and he then writes whatever he’s inspired to create. Neither ...

Leaves Surface Like Skin

By Michelle Menting. Terrapin Books: West Caldwell, NJ, 2017.

In Leaves Surface Like Skin, Michelle Menting articulates gorgeous, strange visions of nature inflected by human interference. A forest is interrupted by a graveyard of Bob’s Big Boy statuettes; ruling cockroaches populate a nuclear fall-out film; lichen becomes litter; a horse and farrier practice their choreography, as he “let[s] her lean on him, her hips cocked, almost delicate.” These poems teem with litany, landscape, literal and figurative image; an awareness ...

Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert, Editors. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017

Veer Ecology is a groundbreaking guide for the twenty-first century, with the editors asking thirty brilliant thinkers to each propose one verb that stresses the forceful potential of inquiry, weather, biomes, apprehensions, and desires to swerve and sheer. Each term is accompanied by a concise essay contextualizing its meaning in times of resource depletion, environmental degradation, and global climate change.

The words most commonly associated with ...