Member Bookshelf

By Lynne Heasley. Michigan State University Press, 2021. 

In The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes, Lynne Heasley illuminates an underwater world that, despite a ferocious industry history, remains wondrous and worthy of care. From its first scene in a benighted Great Lakes river, where lake sturgeon thrash and spawn, this powerful book takes readers on journeys through the Great Lakes, alongside fish and fishers, scuba divers and scientists, toxic pollutants and threatened communities, oil pipelines and invasive species, Indigenous peoples ...

Edited by Lis McLoughlin. Human Error Publishing, 2021. 

Good poems are about more than one thing, and so is this anthology. A coalition of creatives from the first two years of the Authors and Artists Festival honor nature in their unique ways.

From poets’ and artists’ close observations of plants, rivers, and sky we move to question human identity through relationships with animals and the larger web of life. From there we indulge grief, fear, and anger to finally find hope together. Stories of art, science, ...

Edited by Rebecca Bushnell. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. 

Long before the Romantics embraced nature, people in the West saw the human and nonhuman worlds as both intimately interdependent and violently antagonistic. With its peerless selection of ninety-eight original sources concerned with the natural world and humankind’s place within it, The Marvels of the World offers a corrective to the still-prevalent tendency to dismiss premodern attitudes toward nature as simple or univocal.

Gathering together medical texts, herbals, and how-to books, as well as scientific, religious, philosophical, and ...

Edited by Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021. 

Ecohorror represents human fears about the natural world—killer plants and animals, catastrophic weather events, and disquieting encounters with the nonhuman. Its portrayals of animals, the environment, and even scientists build on popular conceptions of zoology, ecology, and the scientific process. As such, ecohorror is a genre uniquely situated to address life, art, and the dangers of scientific knowledge in the Anthropocene.

Featuring new readings of the genre, Fear and Nature brings ecohorror texts and ...

By Scott T. Starbuck. MoonPath Press, 2021. 

I’m grateful to MoonPath Press in Oregon for publishing my new book documenting vanishing Pacific Northwest salmon culture. Previously I posted about this from a historical perspective, and this book continues that theme, except it is based on people I met, places I fished, and climate emergency we are experiencing.

On April 29, 2021, apnews.com reported, “California officials will again truck [‘more than 16.8 million’] young salmon raised at fish hatcheries in the state’s Central Valley agricultural region to the Pacific Ocean ...

By Anne Coray. West Margin Press, 2021.

The searing debut novel of poet and writer Anne Coray, Lost Mountain is an impassioned story of love, loss, environment, and politics against a landscape facing threat of destruction.

When news of an open-pit mining project hits the remote Alaskan hometown of Whetstone Cove, young widow Dehlia Melven barely takes in the town’s nervous chatter. The Ziggurat corporation promises the mine will be fifteen times larger than all the mines in Alaska combined, but Dehlia’s thoughts are consumed by ...

Edited by Michael Boyden. Cambridge University Press, February 2021.

Climate has infused the literary history of the United States, from the writings of explorers and conquerors, over early national celebrations of the American climate, to the flowering of romantic nature writing. This volume traces this complex semantic history in American thought and literature to examine rhetorical and philosophical discourses that continue to propel and constrain American climate perceptions today. It explores how American literature from its inception up until the present engages with the ...

By Helena Feder. Routledge, 2014. 

Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture: Biology and the Bildungsroman draws on work by Kinji Imanishi, Frans de Waal, and other biologists to create an interdisciplinary, materialist notion of culture for ecocritical analysis. In this timely intervention, Feder examines the humanist idea of culture by taking a fresh look at the stories it explicitly tells about itself. These stories fall into the genre of the Bildungsroman, the tale of individual acculturation that participates in the myth of its complete ...

By Lucille Lang Day. Blue Light Press, 2020. 

“The seventy-four poems in Lucille Lang Day’s Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place take the reader on a journey across continents, seas, and time itself. Charged with a lyricism that is at the same time tough and vulnerable, they recreate and preserve images of a beauty that is on the verge of disappearing or has already disappeared. Sometimes it is the beauty of the rain forests of Costa Rica or the birds of the Galápagos ...