Exceptional Mountains: A Cultural History of the Pacific Northwest Volcanoes
By O. Alan Weltzien. University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, NE, 2016.
Over the past 150 years, people have flocked to the Pacific Northwest in increasing numbers, in part due to the region’s beauty and one of its most exceptional features: volcanoes. This segment of the Pacific Ring of Fire has shaped not only the physical landscape of the region but also the psychological landscape, and with it the narratives we compose about ourselves. Exceptional Mountains ...
Rembrandt in the Stairwell
By O. Alan Weltzien. FootHills Publishing: Kanona, New York, 2016.
“Rembrandt in the Stairwell begins in the wild land of the Northwest, then navigates the complex interior of memory as it is woven into the present. Alan Weltzien imagines rooms where images of ancestors and the “ghosts” of grown children linger even as he contemplates ‘the day’s traffic and the world.’ These poems are often elegiac, sometimes ironic or celebratory, and a pleasure to read.” —Tami Haaland, former ...
Lost Salmon
By Scott T. Starbuck. MoonPath Press: Tillamook, 2016.
Lost Salmon is a 79 page poetry collection focusing on the clash between ancient sustaining forces like wild salmon rivers with modern industrial lives. While Starbuck’s first full-length poetry book Industrial Oz: Ecopoems was about the climate change problem, Lost Salmon is more about his concern for climate change rooted in 45 years of love for Pacific Northwest reefs, rivers, and forest areas. There are a few climate change poems in the book, but most are ...
Where the Wind Dreams of Staying: Searching for Purpose and Place in the West
By Eric Dieterle. Oregon State University Press: Corvallis, OR, 2016.
Eric Dieterle’s memoir Where the Wind Dreams of Staying captures the emotional storms of a boy, and then a man, who seeks meaning in a place, or a place with meaning. His restless search for purpose and identity in the American West moves through cycles of success and failure, love and loss.
Dieterle’s journey leads from the plateaus of eastern Washington through the ...
Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities
Edited by Stephen Siperstein, Shane Hall, and Stephanie LeMenager. Routledge: New York, 2016.
Climate change is an enormous and increasingly urgent issue. This important book highlights how humanities disciplines can mobilize the creative and critical power of students, teachers, and communities to confront climate change. The book is divided into four clear sections to help readers integrate climate change into the classes and topics they are already teaching as well as engage with interdisciplinary methods and techniques. Teaching Climate Change ...
Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times
By Stacy Alaimo. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, MN, 2016.
Opening with the statement “The anthropocene is no time to set things straight,” Stacy Alaimo puts forth potent arguments for a material feminist posthumanism in the chapters that follow.
From trans-species art and queer animals to naked protesting and scientific accounts of fishy humans, Exposed argues for feminist posthumanism immersed in strange agencies and scale-shifting ethics. Including such divergent topics as landscape art, ocean ecologies, and plastic activism, ...
Zombiescapes and Phantom Zones: Ecocriticism and the Liminal from “Invisible Man” to “The Walking Dead”
By Lee Rozelle. University of Alabama Press: Tuscaloosa, AL, 2016.
In Zombiescapes and Phantom Zones: Ecocriticism and the Liminal from “Invisible Man” to “The Walking Dead,” Lee Rozelle chronicles the weirdest, ugliest, and most mixed-up characters to appear on the literary scene since World War II—creatures intimately linked to damaged habitats that rise from the muck, not to destroy or rule the world, but to save it. The book asks what happens to ...
Poetry and the Anthropocene: Ecology, Biology and Technology in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry
By Sam Solnick. Routledge: Abingdon; New York, 2016.
Poetry and the Anthropocene asks what it means to write poetry in and about the Anthropocene, the name given to a geological epoch where humans have a global ecological impact. Combining critical approaches such as ecocriticism and posthumanism with close reading and archival research, it argues that the Anthropocene requires poetry and the humanities to find new ways of thinking about unfamiliar spatial and ...
Monstrous Nature: Environment and Horror on the Big Screen
By Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2016.
Godzilla, a traditional natural monster and representation of cinema’s subgenre of natural attack, also provides a cautionary symbol of the dangerous consequences of mistreating the natural world—monstrous nature on the attack. Horror films such as Godzilla invite an exploration of the complexities of a monstrous nature that humanity both creates and embodies.
Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann demonstrate in Monstrous ...
This Human Shape
By Chad Hanson. Northfield, Minnesota: Red Dragonfly Press, 2016.
This new poetry collection by Chad Hanson is populated with interesting characters in the tradition of Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology or Dave Etter’s Sunflower County. The women and men in Hanson’s poems, under the influence of a high plains geography, veer into remarkable transformations and unusual relationships—a dinner date with a waterfall or a spruce tree that goes off to college for instance. Both playful and serious, these poetic vignettes give ...