Member Bookshelf

By Hsuan Hsu. Bloomsbury, 2024.

As a technology of environmental comfort, air conditioning aspires to pass unnoticed. Yet, by manipulating the air around us, it quietly conditions the baseline conditions of our physical, mental, and emotional experience. In homes, offices, libraries, museums, archives, and shopping malls, climate control systems shore up the fantasy of a comfortable, self-contained body. At the same time that air conditioning makes temperature a non-issue in (some) people’s daily lives, thermoception—or the sensory perception of temperature—is being carefully studied and ...

By Amanda Passmore-Ott. Finishing Line Press, 2024.

Human Wilderness contains poems that explore the tension between human nature and the natural world through deep observation and reflection. The title of the collection suggests the exploration of nature leads to an even deeper exploration of what it means to be human as the poems take the reader on a lyric journey of loss, longing, becoming, understanding, and acceptance. Ultimately, Human Wilderness is a potential for metamorphosis.

Amanda Passmore-Ott teaches writing at The Pennsylvania State University and ...

By Rick Van Noy. Cornell/Three Hills, 2024.

After a near-fatal stroke and a separation, amidst a global pandemic, Rick Van Noy decided to go for a paddle. In Borne by the River, he charts the story of discovery, and healing that came from this solo canoe journey. Paddling two hundred miles on the Delaware River to his boyhood home just upriver from Trenton, New Jersey, Van Noy contemplates his fate and life, as well as the simple joy of sitting in a small boat floating down ...

By David Shackleton. Oxford University Press, 2023.

This book assesses the environmental politics of modernism in relation to the idea of the Anthropocene—a proposed geological epoch in which humans have fundamentally changed the Earth System. The early twentieth century was marked by environmental transformations that were so complex and happened on such great scales that they defied representation. Modernist novelists responded with a range of innovative narrative forms that started to make environmental crisis on a planetary scale visible. Paradoxically, however, it ...

By Micah McKay. University of Florida Press, 2024.

Trash and Limits in Latin American Culture looks at the role of waste in Latin American cultural texts from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and makes the case for foregrounding trash as an object of analysis in literary and cultural studies in Spanish America and Brazil. By considering how writers and filmmakers engage with the theme, Micah McKay argues that garbage illuminates key limits related to the region’s experience with contemporary capitalism.

Recognizing trash as an important ...

By Barbara Leckie. Stanford University Press, 2022.

In this moment of climate precarity, Victorian studies scholar Barbara Leckie considers the climate crisis as a problem of time. Spanning the long nineteenth century through our current moment, her interdisciplinary treatment of climate change at once rethinks time and illustrates that the time for climate action is now.

Climate Change, Interrupted argues that linear, progress-inflected temporalities are not adequate to a crisis that defies their terms. Instead, this book advances a theory and practice of interruption to ...

By Kamala Platt. De Gruyter, 2023.

Environmental Justice Poetics: Cultural Representations of Environmental Racism From Chicanas and Women in India is a book that compels scholars, activists, artists and planetary citizens of all ilk to reconsider their relationships with earth and each other. More regenerative than groundbreaking, this study of expressive work by Mexican American and South Asian women engaged at the nexus of ecology and justice imparts a route toward a calm climate in an equitable world.

While offering a critique of patriarchal structures ...

By Boria Sax. Reaktion Books, 2023.

In 1985 Boria Sax inherited an area of forest in New York State that had been purchased by his Russian, Jewish Communist grandparents as a buffer against what they felt was a hostile world. For Sax, in the years following, the woodland came to represent a link with those who lived and had lived there, including Native Americans, settlers, bears, deer, turtles and migrating birds. In this personal and eloquent account, Sax explores the meanings and cultural history ...

By Debbie Urbanski. Simon & Schuster, 2023.

After World is about humanity’s relationship with the planet and who or what in that relationship is most important. It’s also about artificial intelligence, climate change, extinction, and the future. Humanity has gone extinct to save the planet, and an AI narrator is tasked to tell the story of Sen Anon, the last human on Earth. But as the AI goes about researching and recording Sen’s life, they become uncomfortable with the direction Sen’s story is taking, so ...

By Leanne Dunic. Talonbooks, 2024.

In Wet, a transient Chinese American model working in Singapore thirsts for the unattainable: fair labour rights, the extinguishing of nearby forest fires, breathable air, healthy habitats for animals, human connection. She navigates place and placelessness while observing other migrant workers toiling outdoors despite the hazardous conditions. Through photographs and language shot through with empathy and desire, Wet unravels complexities of social stratification, sexual privation, and environmental catastrophe.

Leanne Dunic (she/her) is a biracial, bisexual woman who has spent her life navigating liminal ...