The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters with Deep Sea Life
By Stacy Alaimo. University of Minnesota Press, 2025.
In an era of accelerating extinctions, what does it mean to discover thousands of new species in the deep sea?
As we see the catastrophic effects of the Anthropocene proliferate, advanced technologies also grant us greater access to the furthest reaches of the world’s oceans, facilitating the discovery of countless new species. Sorting through the implications of this strange paradox, Stacy Alaimo explores the influence this newfound intimacy with the deep sea might have on our broader ...
Satellite: Essays on Fatherhood and Home, Near and Far
By Simmons Buntin. Trinity University Press, 2025.
In Satellite, Simmons Buntin delves into the idea of belonging—in place, time, family, and community—in 16 essays written over nearly two decades. The pieces range throughout the Desert Southwest, on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, and as far afield as Mount Saint Helens, Montana, Vermont, Sweden, and even the moon (if a telescope atop Kitt Peak counts). Buntin examines the beauty and challenges of raising a family and creating more sustainable communities in the Sonoran Desert—and, ...
Arcticologies: Early Modern Actions for Our Warmer World
By Lowell Duckert. University of Minnesota Press, 2025.
Do we really know what cold is? In Arcticologies, Lowell Duckert delves into early modern European texts to trace how representations of frigidity from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have contributed to historical understandings of climate and contemporary debates on climate change. Arguing that human culture and science are, in fact, indebted to the cold, Duckert suggests that these early depictions offer critical terms for advancing the aims of climate-change activism and assisting in counterapocalyptic thinking.
An ...
The Place That Is Coming to Us
By J.D. Smith. Broadstone Books, 2025.
The Place That Is Coming to Us addresses our frequently troubled human relationship with the non-human world using a variety of free-verse styles as well as prose poetry. The topics include climate change, habitat loss, and species extinction, along with ecogrief at large, and the collection’s final poems discuss how we might return to a more collegial relationship with the natural world.
J.D. Smith is the author of poetry collections including Catalogs for Food Lovers (Kelsay Books, 2021), The Killing ...
Fault Lines
Nora Shalaway Carpenter. Running Press/Hachette, Sept. 2023.
Winner of the 2024 Green Earth Book Award for YA Fiction, a 2024 Whippoorwill Honor for outstanding rural fiction, and a 2024 Nautilus Book Award Gold medal, FAULT LINES tells the intertwined story of two rural teens―one with a secret energetic connection to the earth, suffering immensely from damage caused by fracking―and the other depending on fracking completely, his mother’s pipelining job being the only thing keeping them off the street.
Riveting, powerful, and a little bit magical, ...
The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence
By Benjamin Mangrum. Stanford University Press, 2025.
In The Comedy of Computation, a cultural history of the computer, Benjamin Mangrum shows that comedy has been central to how we’ve made sense of the technology’s sweeping effects on public life and private experience. From the first Broadway play to include a computer in the 1950s to popular films like You’ve Got Mail and joke-telling digital assistants, Mangrum assembles an extensive archive of work by writers, filmmakers, programmers, engineers, and other technologists who have coupled comedy ...
the verdant
By Linda Russo. Middle Creek Publishing, 2024.
Awarded a Halcyon Award for Poetry from Middle Creek Publishing, the verdant tells of springtime emergence in intimate attunement with the more-than-human world. It is a spacious, lyrical serial poem that holds myriad presences and voices in an imaginative terrain beyond human individualism. Over a lunar cycle, from the Flower Moon of May to the Strawberry Moon of June, the verdant, who is “charged to comprehend,” escapes capitalocene logics and temporalities to find vibrancy, companionship, and counsel ...
Working Watersheds: Water and Energy in the Lackawanna Valley
By Bill Conlogue. Temple University Press, 2025.
A personal narrative, an examination of literary texts, and a history of the Lackawanna Valley region, Bill Conlogue’s Working Watersheds explores how water has circulated in the former anthracite capital of the world. Conlogue not only recounts water’s use in anthracite mining and textile making, but also investigates its resulting pollution. He delves into the current natural gas boom, which threatens groundwater, and concludes with hopes of environmental renewal and restoration.
Offering a fresh way to think about ...
Sacred Wonderland: The History of Religion in Yellowstone
By Thomas Bremer. University of Nebraska Press, 2025.
Sacred Wonderland: The Religious History of Yellowstone traces the religious dimensions of Yellowstone’s meanings, purposes, and popularity as the nation’s premier national park. Since its beginning in 1872, the world’s first national park has been a repository of meanings and aspirations for the people of the United States, an alluring destination with significance beyond its stunning mountain scenery, abundant wildlife, and the world’s most extensive collection of geysers, hot springs, and other thermal features. Deemed “America’s ...
The Ecology of British and American Empire Writing, 1704-1894
By Louis Kirk McAuley. Edinburgh University Press, 2024.
At this critical juncture in which the biodiversity of planet Earth appears to be shrinking fast and furiously, Louis Kirk McAuley invites us to consider the ways in which particular unruly natures, including animals, plants and minerals, actively intervene in literature to decentre the human. Drawing upon invasion biology, in The Ecology of British and American Empire Writing, 1704-1894, McAuley offers transformative ecocritical interpretations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American literature and highlights the heterarchical nature ...