Here are a number of recently published or about-to-be-published books that have come across our desks.
Love Story with Birds
By Derek Furr
“Let us be at a loss for words,” writes Derek Furr in Love Story with Birds. He writes this, as he writes everything in this collection of his stories, poems, and essays, with an earnestness that never once teeters toward naivete. Whether advocating for animals as “fellow creatures,” weighing the forms of the word “still,” or ruminating on the “skulking” dance of the green heron, Furr’s tone is reasonable and tempered by humility. But don’t be fooled — these works display a daring and erudite imagination that may, indeed, leave you “at a loss for words.”
–Celia Bland, author of Cherokee Road Kill
The Burning Earth: A History
by Sunil Amrith
In this magisterial book, historian Sunil Amrith twins the stories of environment and Empire, of genocide and eco-cide, of an extraordinary expansion of human freedom and its planetary costs. Drawing on an extraordinarily rich diversity of primary sources, he reckons with the ruins of Portuguese silver mining in Peru, British gold mining in South Africa, and oil extraction in Central Asia. He explores the railroads and highways that brought humans to new terrains of battle against each other and against stubborn nature. Amrith’s account of the ways in which the First and Second World Wars involved the massive mobilization not only of men, but of other natural resources from around the globe, provides an essential new way of understanding war as an irreversible reshaping of the planet. So too does this book reveal the reality of migration as consequence of environmental harm.
Koe: An Aotearoa ecopoetry anthology
Edited by Janet Newman and Robert Sullivan
Koe invites readers to explore human connections with nature through a selection of over 100 poems composed in Aotearoa New Zealand from pre-European times to the present day. Including a substantial introduction and editors’ notes, Koe is the first anthology to provide a comprehensive overview of ecopoetic traditions in Aotearoa and to locate these traditions as part of the global ecopoetry scene.
In Koe, editors Janet Newman and Robert Sullivan reveal the genesis, development and heritage of a unique Aotearoa New Zealand ecopoetry derived from both traditional Māori poetry and the English poetry canon. Organised chronologically into three sections—representing the early years (poets born in or before the nineteenth century), the middle years of the twentieth century, and the twenty-first-century ‘now’—each segment presents a diverse array of voices. Across all these time frames, speaking from the conditions of their era, the poets delve into themes of humility, reverence and interconnectedness with the nonhuman world. They challenge traditional Eurocentric perspectives, highlight the significance of indigenous narratives, and wrestle with the impacts of European colonisation.
Given
Poetry by Liza Katz Duncan
Liza Katz Duncan’s debut collection is a poignant exploration of the unpredictable shifts that shape our lives. Given considers the notions of home and family and how to survive the changes and losses associated with both. Duncan conjures her home, the New Jersey Shore, in clear and unsentimental lines: “Call of the grackle, / whine of the turkey vulture. Blighted clams, // raw and red in their half-shells.” Duncan’s poems also explore the devastation brought to this place and its community by Superstorm Sandy and the continued impacts of climate change.
Interwoven into this thread is the narrator’s miscarriage; the parallels between the desecrated landscape and the personal catastrophe further contribute to the layers of tenderness in this collection, as Duncan urges us to remember and to witness. Despite tragedy and loss, Given is imbued with persistent, dogged hope, showing how survival persists among the wreckage, and from this debris is a path toward healing our grief.
Summoned by the Earth: Becoming a Holy Vessel for Healing Our World
by Cynthia Jurs
The most pressing question in these uncertain times may well be, How can we bring healing and protection to the Earth? It was this very question that Cynthia Jurs carried with her in 1990 as she climbed a path high in the Himalayas, to meet an “old wise man in a cave”–a venerated lama from Nepal. In response to her question, the old lama gave her a formidable assignment based on an ancient practice from Tibet: she must procure earth treasure vases made of clay and potent medicines, fill them with prayers and symbolic offerings, and bury them around the world where healing is called for. Thus begins the journey of a lifetime–sometimes harrowing, but always shining with beauty at the threshold between urgency and the timelessness of the sacred.
John is co-author, with Midge Raymond, of the eco-mystery Devils Island, forthcoming in 2024. He is also author of the novels The Tourist Trail and Where Oceans Hide Their Dead. Co-founder of Ashland Creek Press and editor of Writing for Animals (also now a writing program).
