Member Bookshelf

By Abby Goode. The University of North Carolina Press, 2022.

In Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability, Abby L. Goode reveals the foundations of American environmentalism and the enduring partnership between racism, eugenics, and agrarian ideals in the United States. Throughout the nineteenth century, writers as diverse as Martin Delany, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Walt Whitman worried about unsustainable conditions such as population growth and plantation slavery. In response, they imagined agrotopias—sustainable societies unaffected by the nation’s agricultural and population crises—elsewhere. Though seemingly ...

By Trey Moody. Conduit Books, 2023.

AUTOBLIVION traces the difficulties of raising a young child in the Anthropocene. Haunted by the looming inevitability of environmental collapse, the poems invoke traditional storytelling genres to look ahead into the unknown. While also exploring various forms of loss, the collection ultimately serves as a love letter to a daughter’s childhood, an act of preservation for now and of preparation for an opaque future.

Trey Moody was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. The author of Autoblivion (Conduit ...

By Diana Woodcock. Codhill Press, 2023.

The speaker of the poems in Heaven Underfoot –by immersing herself in the more than human world of several diverse biomes, from the Arabian Desert to the Everglades, Southern Africa, the Arctic Circle, Great Smoky Mountains, and the Tongass National Forest– has endeavored to make the non-human environment central rather than marginal as she explores and celebrates the sacred within and on this earth.

The poems in Heaven Underfoot qualify as ecopoetry as they exemplify the four features of ...

By Anne McCrary Sullivan. Saint Julian Press, 2023.

The poems of Notes from a Marine Biologist’s Daughter honor a mother’s ways of learning, seeing, and being in relation with the world. Some of the poems are explicitly about the mother while others embody forms of attention and perception that are the mother’s living legacy. This work is grounded in close observation of the natural world, often the world of the Everglades and its mangrove wilderness. It is rich in botanical detail and knowledge of ...

By Mandy-Suzanne Wong. Graywolf Press (USA), House of Anansi (Canada), 2023.

A stylistically dazzling novel about things, people, and the forces and seams between them.

Of course, each thing has its own sides to every story.

In a dark and crooked lane in an unnamed city where it never ceases to snow, a small white box falls from a coat pocket. It is made of paper strips woven tightly together; there is no apparent way to open it without destroying it. What ...

Edited by Joela Jacobs and Agnes Malinowska.

punctum books, 2023.

Microbium: The Neglected Lives of Micro-matter tells the story of small matter such as bacteria, coral, fungi, lichen, pollen, protozoa, and viruses. With short entries that are organized like a herbarium or similar specimen collection, the book is a “microbium”—both the term for a single microbe and a play on “microbiome.”

As such, Microbium makes visible the often overseen but huge impact of miniscule matter on human culture and the environment. Each entry is a “microscopic ...

Edited by Luisa A. Igloria, Aileen Cassinetto and Jeremy S. Hoffman.

Paloma Press, 2023.

In the U.S., the congressionally mandated Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) report is currently in development, and groups of scientists from all over the country and Caribbean are overseeing the synthesis of published research for regional and topic-specific chapters. For the first time, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy through the U.S. Global Research Program has included the arts to encourage wider participation in the National Climate Assessment, ...

By R. Sreejith Varma, Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2023.

Reading Contemporary Environmental Justice: Narratives from Kerala investigates 11 contemporary environmental justice narratives from Kerala, the south-western state in India. Introducing a detailed review of environmental literature in Malayalam, the selected eco-narratives are presented through two key literary genres: life narratives and novels, conveying the socio-environmental pressures, problems, and anxieties of modern, globalizing Kerala. This text also entails primary investigations of ‘toxic fictions’ and ‘extractivist fictions,’ including Malayalam novels that narrate the disastrous consequences of the ...

By JoeAnn Hart. Black Lawrence Press, 2023.

In this collection of short fiction, a young couple raises crickets for food, a woman in a caged complex is witness to the deterioration of her neighbor, a homeless man contemplates an infant’s grave from the Westward Expansion, and an uncompromising ego takes on a Biblical rain. These are among the stories from Highwire Act & Other Tales of Survival, where the climate crisis arrives not just as strange and violent weather, but as upheavals in our political ...

By Gisela Heffes. Palgrave, 2023.

Visualizing Loss in Latin America engages with a varied corpus of textual, visual, and cultural material with specific intersections with the natural world, arguing that Latin American literary and cultural production goes beyond ecocriticism as a theoretical framework of analysis. Gisela Heffes poses the following crucial question: How do we construct a conceptual theoretical apparatus to address issues of value, meaning, tradition, perspective, and language, that contributes substantially to environmental thinking, and that is part and parcel of Latin ...