We have quite a few new books to share with you — a mix of poetry, fiction and nonfiction.
Enjoy!
Wild, Unfelt World
By Hillary Gonzalez
When was the last time you allowed yourself to listen to birdsong? Sat with it in your heart, and truly took it in? In this dazzling and stirring collection of eco-poetry, written by Hillary Gonzalez, Wild, Unfelt World bridges the connection between the physical and spiritual, urging readers to reconnect with the natural world, and begging the question: why haven’t you listened to birds lately? Written by an autistic, queer, and disabled birder, this collection of poems is rooted with the changing seasons, the rising and setting of the sun, and the heartbeat of the world around us.
Written during bird walks in the early morning hours, Gonzalez invites the reader to come on a journey with them. Smell the salt of the marshes, feel the roughness of tree bark beneath your hands, and listen to the call of the owl as evening nears. Exploring themes of conservation, neurodivergence, spirituality, and a deep love for the environment, the reader will be transported with Gonzalez. Each carefully crafted poem serves as not only a meditative reflection, but a rallying cry to celebrate our ecosystems and confront the urgent need to protect them.
The Mermaid’s Wrath
By Andie Holman
The ocean is dying. It falls to a mermaid to save it.
The Mers are barely surviving in a magical marine bubble, isolated from the rest of the world. Jelly, warrior mermaid and hardened champion of sea life, is sworn to battle against the choking, accelerating pollution.
When the black pearl at Jelly’s throat wakes and opens her mind to terrifying premonitions, she realizes her only choice is to leave the ocean and collaborate with the estranged magical beings of land. A woman haunts her dark visions, abducted for the power in her veins, and Jelly might just be the key to this woman’s freedom, and the salvation of the world.
The Mermaid’s Wrath is the first volume in The Laughter of the Sun series, and a tale of romantasy, mythology, and one mermaid’s battle against climate change.
The Kite and the Snail
By Hilary Flower
When a bird of prey known as the Everglade snail kite became hard to find in the wetlands of South Florida where it was once abundant, scientist Hilary Flower sought answers, tracking the kite far from its ancestral home to tell a surprising story of survival and hope. The Kite and the Snail reveals how one species made a comeback from the brink of extinction through resilience and change—and what this means for the future of conservation.
From remote sawgrass marshes to abandoned mining pits, from flooded cattle pastures to water-treatment impoundments, Flower meets field biologists, tribal elders, environmental advocates, and other key players who help her piece together the kite’s past and present. The Everglade snail kite has traditionally fed on only the native Florida apple snail, which declined in population as wetland habitats decreased during the mid- to late twentieth century. But the kite shocked scientists by adapting to a new food source—an invasive, exotic snail that is now common across the Everglades and beyond—and quadrupling the kites’ population.
A rare success story in an age of increasing threats of extinction, this book traces the evolutionary and ecological factors that have allowed the kite to thrive against the odds. The Kite and the Snail asks: How can endangered species be saved when the world around them keeps shifting? Part natural history, part investigative journey, and part personal meditation, this story shows that flexibility, surprise, and human-altered habitats may play unexpected roles in saving species at risk, pointing to new approaches to conservation in the age of the Anthropocene.
Bertha’s Law
By Pierre Durand
Based on oral and written accounts, Bertha’s mysterious life is told through a collection of fictionalised episodes and images. Criss-crossing Africa, she hatches plans to free the animals she encounters—chickens, owls, ostriches, chimpanzees, donkeys, elephants and many others—forming profound friendships with the people she meets along the way, like the Tanzanian children Bakari and Amida, her Nigerian rescuer Ifeoluwa, and traveling salesman Alphonse. But there is danger in almost every situation and Bertha must reckon with a bizarre array of characters. There are hunters and animal traders in Kenya, a gangster Jerome (aka Spares) in South Africa, the menacing circus performer Mathieu in the DRC, and even ghouls blown in from the Kalahari desert. Hilarious and tragic, this is the story of her uncompromising belief in animal liberty. No matter the cost.
Might Could
By Anna Lena Phillips Bell
In Might Could, selected for the Hecht Prize by Shane McCrae, Anna Lena considers how to make a life in hurricane country, amid a verdant landscape touched by industrial pollution and the climate crisis. Even as they carry the knowledge of potential and actual harm, her profound, formally inventive poems establish an expansive sense of place and play. With precise intonation, uncanny and often exuberant diction, and subtle humor, Might Could contemplates meaningful companionship with one’s own body, with human family, and with the more-than-human world.
Nature’s Last Dance: Tales of Wonder in an Age of Extinction
By Natalie Kyriacou
Amidst the tragedy of wild species extinction lies a hidden world of survival and wonder. Conservationists are locked in a high-stakes battle with the ghost of a drug lord and his herd of hippos. Scientists are fighting to save a flightless bird that romances rocks. Unconventional animals are upending 21st century beauty standards, and financiers are betting on whale poo to make its debut on Wall Street.
This is a story of survival and extinction, of life and death, of curiosity and perversion, of unimaginable joy and harrowing sorrow.
Set against the backdrop of a rapidly unfolding mass extinction event, Nature’s Last Dance takes readers across hunting grounds, through jungles and oceans, inside communities, through courtrooms, and into the heart of battles to survive against all odds.
Wicked Weather: Natural Disasters that Changed History
By Alexander Gates
Natural disasters occur on a regular basis throughout the world with severe events occurring every few years or less. Each disaster type impacts human settlements in different ways and can be local, affecting small countries or areas, or global, affecting the world. These disasters destabilized populations, the governments of provinces and countries, and drastically impact populations and the priorities of a nation in response to a natural disaster. In other words, they changed history.
In Wicked Weather, Alexander Gates explores these notable environmental disasters and their impacts, raising the question: What can we do to prevent this from happening again? After an introduction on why certain disasters occur most often in specific areas, Gates covers history’s most impactful volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, hurricanes/cyclones/typhoons, tornadoes, droughts, floods, and tsunamis. Each chapter investigates significant cases of each environmental disaster that shifted power in a region, caused wars, toppled governments, or changed policies and the way people approached life in these parts of the world.
Accelerated Growth Environment
By Lauren C. Teffeau
Dr. Jorna Benton is proud to be the Principal Scientist for the Climasphere, a massive, sea-going ecological nursery capable of supporting nearly every biome on Earth. On its inaugural mission to restore and re-wild collapsing ecosystems along the Atlantic coast, Jorna manages the Climasphere’s habitat and harvest, while her colleague—and inconveniently attractive commander—Ava Kaysar directs the rest of the vessel’s critical operations.
When an explosion rocks the Climasphere, Jorna’s carefully-managed world is thrown into chaos, threatening both her personal and her professional future. And worse: she’s the prime suspect.
To clear her name, save the mission, and preserve her chance at a future with Kaysar, Jorna must finally confront the secret she’s been running from all these years: a family and a faith that could destroy her.
Out on a Limb: Saving the Urban Tree Canopy
By Erna Buffie
It’s often said that trees are the only form of city infrastructure that actually increase in value and capacity over time. So why have so many North American cities historically underfunded their care and maintenance? And why do we continue to indiscriminately mow down trees – and entire urban forests? Out On A Limb answers these questions and more as it explores the secret lives and extraordinary infrastructure benefits of trees in cities, the critical role urban forests can play in increasing climate resiliency, and how grassroots organizations can empower city leaders to invest in the urban trees and forests we love–and need.
The Fifth Plague: Cattle, Contagion, and the Medical Posthumanities
By Lucinda Cole
This book examines murrain, or mass mortalities of cattle, in ways that bridge the gap between animal studies and the health humanities. Beginning with early modern European disease ecologies but informed by contemporary epidemiological and ecological concerns, The Fifth Plague offers a new historical approach to literary plague studies, one taking seriously real and imagined relationships between human outbreaks, such as bubonic plague and cholera, and a series of even more mysterious animal diseases that killed in equally great numbers. Chapters include careful readings of literary texts by, among others, William Shakespeare, John Dryden, Daniel Defoe, and Sophie Amelia Prosser.. Uniting these readings is a shared history of murrains recorded in Virgil, but also the powerful legacy of the Ten Plagues of Egypt narrative, in which human and non-human afflictions are materially and theologically bound. “Great mortalities” of cattle, Cole argues, brought with them feelings of individual and collective vulnerability. As scientists and humanists face increasingly politicized information networks, this book calls for an exploration of the past, present, and future of humanity’s decidedly interdependent and zoonotic existence.
Tipping Point
Jane Lovell
Tipping Point slips into the Arctic’s half-light, where nothing is quite as it seems. It evokes a landscape at once ghostly and elemental, where ocean and wildlife face an uncertain future and the impact of human exploitation meets the resilience of long-lived cultures.
These poems trace the region’s fragile ecologies, catching both its eerie beauty and the silence of a planet tipping towards the point of no return. Lovell navigates the histories and mythologies of ice, mapping the tension between beauty and devastation — from the age of exploration to our era of climate crisis.
John is co-author, with Midge Raymond, of the mystery Devils Island. 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). More at JohnYunker.com.