Craft & Current: A Manual for Magical Writing
By Janisse Ray. Trackless Wild LLC, 2024.
To write killer prose you need three things.
You need craft. That means you need to learn how to put words together so they say more than what’s on the page. You have to push your words to say more. Plus, something more than craft is necessary. You need a sparkling, juicy, and ever-deepening relationship with mystery. You have to get yourself into that current. How? How do you tap into magic and transfer it to the page? You need ...Time and Nature in the Poetry of Niyi Osundare: Poetics of Animism, Anthropocene, and Capitalocene
By Chukwunwike Anolue. Routledge, 2024.
Time and Nature in the Poetry of Niyi Osundare provides an ecocritical analysis of the poetry of the famous Nigerian poet Niyi Osundare. It interrogates the intricate interface between time and nature in 11 of Osundare’s defining poetry collections. This is a book of postcolonial ecocriticism from an African perspective. It brings together the ecocritical theory of animism and theories of geologic time in the discussion of Osundare’s poetry. Osundare shows that animism has a lot to offer in ...
Devils Island
By Midge Raymond and John Yunker. Oceanview Publishing, 2024.
On a remote island off the coast of Tasmania, an Australian wilderness guide embarks on a four-day hike with six guests—and arrives at their destination with only two. Through the structure of a closed-door mystery, Devils Island tells the story of the Tasmanian devil and its struggle to survive. While there’s an abundance of nonfiction about climate change and mass extinction, Devils Island adds to a small but fast-growing sub-genre of eco-mysteries.
Midge Raymond is the ...
Reimagining the More-Than-Human City: Stories from Singapore
By Jamie Wang. MIT Press, 2024.
This book is an exploration of the multifaceted urban environmental issues in Singapore through a more-than-human lens, calling for new ways to think of and story cities. As climate change accelerates and urbanization intensifies, our need for more sustainable and livable cities has never been more urgent. Yet, the imaginary of a flourishing urban ecofuture is often driven by a specific version of sustainability that is tied to both high-tech futurism and persistent economic growth. What kinds of ...
Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection
By Heather Swan. Penn State University Press, 2024.
Through narrative, verse, and art, Where the Grass Still Sings celebrates the many tiny creatures that play crucial roles in our ecosystems—as well as the people on the front lines of the fight to save them. Weaving art and science with inspiring stories of people doing their part to protect insects and the environment, author Heather Swan takes readers around the globe to highlight practical solutions to safeguard our fragile planet. Visit a sustainable coffee farm ...
Arroyo Circle
By JoeAnn Hart. Green Writers Press, 2024.
In the novel ARROYO CIRCLE, hoarding and homelessness are depicted through the dark marriage of environmental degradation and rampant capitalism. The story explores our collective role in the climate crisis through the lives of Shelley, a white, middle-aged handmaiden of a hoarder, and Les, an alcoholic, shape-shifting scientist, who lives in the creek bed behind Shelley’s house in Boulder, Colorado. As wildfires in the mountains fill the town with smoke, Shelley is confronted by gun-wielding police who ...
Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor
By Lisa Han. University of Minnesota Press, 2024.
Green energy technologies such as windmills, solar panels, and electric vehicles may soon depend on material found at the seabed. How did a space once imagined to be empty and unfathomable come to be thought of as a treasure trove of resources? Set against the backdrop of climate change, energy transition, and the expansion of industrial offshore extractions, Deepwater Alchemy looks at the role that oceanic media have played in representing the seafloor as a ...
The Farmer, the Gastronome, and the Chef: In Pursuit of the Ideal Meal
By Daniel Philippon. University of Virginia Press, 2024.
At turns heartfelt and witty, accessible and engaging, The Farmer, the Gastronome, and the Chef explores how Wendell Berry, Carlo Petrini, and Alice Waters have changed America’s relationship with food over the past fifty years. Daniel Philippon weighs the legacy of each of these writers and activists while planting and harvesting vegetables in central Wisconsin, speaking with growers and food producers in northern Italy, and visiting with chefs and restaurateurs in southeastern France. Following Berry, ...
We Are Animals: On the Nature and Politics of Motherhood
By Jennifer Case. Trinity University Press, 2024.
When Jennifer Case became pregnant unexpectedly with her second child, she was overwhelmed at the prospect of caring for another child in a society with high expectations and low support for mothers. She sought to reclaim control over, if not her changing body, then at least her rapidly declining mental health. Immersing herself in research, Case learned that the United States has one of the highest maternal death rates among developed countries. One in every five women develops ...
The Odd Month
By Valeria Meiller. Black Ocean, 2024
Known colloquially as “the odd month” for its unusual number of days, February in the rural Argentine imaginary has historically represented an auspicious time: the only month without rain, in which that season’s crops are gathered, celebrated, tallied, and accounted for. Drawing on this idea, The Odd Month charts a dystopian, lyrical landscape at the intersection of the twentieth-century agroindustry in Argentina and the devastating drought in the region from 2008 to 2009.
The poems are informed by the ...