Howl: of Woman and Wolf
By Susan Imhoff Bird. Torrey House Press: Salt Lake City, UT, 2015.
Commemorating twenty years since the wolf’s return to the American West, Howl explores passions and controversies surrounding nature’s most fascinating predator. At a crossroads in her own life, Bird travels the West uncovering both a common love for the land and conflicting beliefs about wildlife among people who work with, for, or near wolves. Unleashed herself, she learns to howl.
Susan Imhoff Bird finds inspiration in Utah’s stunning canyons, ...
Romantic Ecocriticism: Origins and Legacies
Edited by Dewey W. Hall – Foreword by James C. McKusick. Lexington Books: Lanham, MD, 2016.
Romantic Ecocriticism: Origins and Legacies is a collection of essays which develop transnational and transhistorical approaches to the proto-ecological early environmental aspects in British and American Romanticism. The edition’s transnational approach is demonstrated through transatlantic connections and comparisons among writers such as: William Wordsworth, William Howitt, and Henry D. Thoreau; John Clare and Aldo Leopold; Charles Darwin and Ralph W. Emerson; William Wordsworth and ...
The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh
By Kathryn Aalto. Timber Press: Portland, OR, 2015.
The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh explores the magical landscapes where Pooh, Christopher Robin, and their friends live and play. The Hundred Acre Wood—the setting for Winnie-the-Pooh’s adventures—was inspired by Ashdown Forest, a wildlife haven that spans more than 6,000 acres in southeast England. It functions as nature writing, well-informed biography, travelogue and a field guide to a literary landscape rolled into ...
Cold Blood Hot Sea
By Charlene D’Avanzo. Torrey House Press: Salt Lake City, UT, May, 2016.
A thrilling contribution to the new wave of cli-fi novels, Cold Blood Hot Sea pits climate change scientists against big energy conspirators. When a colleague is killed aboard the research vessel Intrepid, oceanographer Mara Tusconi believes it’s no accident. As she investigates, Mara becomes entangled in a scheme involving powerful energy executives with much to lose if her department colleagues continue their climate change research. Mara’s career—and life—is on ...
Earth and Eros: A Celebration in Words and Photographs
Compiled by Lorraine Anderson, with photographs by Bruce Hodge and foreword by Robert Michael Pyle. White Cloud Press: Ashland, OR, 2015.
Our bodies and the earth are intimately connected. But because so many of us live more online than on the land, it’s easy to forget this connection.
Earth and Eros brings together prose and poetry by nearly seventy writers—including Terry Tempest Williams, Gary Snyder, Pablo Neruda, Diane Ackerman, Sherman Alexie, Zora Neale Hurston, D. H. Lawrence, Louise ...
Winterkill
By Todd Davis. Michigan State University Press: East Lansing, MI, 2016.
Todd Davis’s new book of poetry, Winterkill, has just been published by Michigan State University Press. Winterkill is Davis’s fifth book of poems and is praised by Stephen Dunn, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, as having “just the right balance of reverence, precision, and quiet indictment . . .which means it does not shy away from death, or the predatory, or the speaker’s involvement in nature’s processes.” According to Gray’s Sporting ...
Knocking on Heaven’s Door
By Sharman Apt Russell. Yucca/Skyhorse Publishing: New York, 2016.
Knocking on Heaven’s Door is an eco science fiction set in a Paleoterrific future.
In the 23rd century, humans live in utopia, hunting and gathering in tribal bands, reunited with old (cloned) friends like the mammoth and saber-toothed cat, connected by solar-powered laptops, buoyed by the belief in a panpsychic universe in which consciousness pervades matter. A 150 years after the supervirus that killed off most of humanity, our return to a Paleoterrific lifestyle ...
Other Country: Barry Lopez and the Community of Artists
By James Perrin Warren. University of Arizona Press: Tuscon, AZ, 2015.
The award-winning American environmental writer Barry Lopez has traveled extensively in remote and populated parts of the world. Lopez’s fiction and nonfiction focus on the relationship between the physical landscape and human culture, posing abiding questions about ethics, intimacy, and place.
Other Country presents a full-scale treatment of Lopez’s work. James Perrin Warren examines the relationship between Lopez’s writing and the work of several contemporary artists, composers, ...
The Practice of Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture
By Raymond Malewitz. Stanford University Press: Redwood City, CA, 2014.
In the age of Ikea Hackers and salvagepunks, The Practice of Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture charts the emergence of “rugged consumers” who creatively misuse, reuse, and repurpose the objects within their environments to suit their idiosyncratic needs and desires. Figures of both literary and material culture whose behavior evokes an American can-do ethic, rugged consumers mediate between older mythic models of self-sufficiency and the ...
Industrial Oz: Ecopoems
By Scott T. Starbuck. Fomite Press: Burlington, VT, 2015.
Industrial Oz: Ecopoems is a 104 page poetry collection about CEOs’ and politicians’ Titanic arrogance in the face of human-caused climate destruction. Bill McKibben described it as “rousing, needling, haunting,” and Thomas Rain Crowe noted it “just may be the most cogent and sustained collection of quality eco-activist poetry ever written in this culture, this country.” Bryan R. Monte of Amsterdam Quarterly wrote, “Starbuck brings the personal and the political quickly together as in his short poem about ...