Description
Book SynopsisIn response to the growing scale and complexity of environmental threats, this volume collects articles, essays, personal narratives, and poems by more than forty authors in conversation about “thinking continental”—connecting local and personal landscapes to universal systems and processes—to articulate the concept of a global or planetary citizenship.
Trade Review"
Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place as a Time is an anthology of poetry, personal narratives, and critical essays that responds holistically to the unprecedented pressures on the environment today."—Greg Brown,
World Literature Today"With its novel conjunction of scientists and artists, this collection is not only a groundbreaking but also a wave-making model of collaborative mapping."—John Shoptaw,
Western American Literature"In this diverse and varied anthology, editors Thomas Lynch, Susan Naramore Maher, Drucilla Wall, and O. Alan Weltzien bring together different perspectives, bridging the gap between the local and planetary scales most commonly seen in environmental writing."—Cory Willard,
Goose“This is exactly the kind of book that helps us to understand where and who we are, what it means to be ‘emplaced’ on this planet.”—Scott Slovic, coeditor of
Ecocritical Aesthetics: Language, Beauty, and the Environment “With the help of literature, these essays and poems lead us from personal particulars to our shared planet, and in so doing, they nourish our filamentary imaginations.”—SueEllen Campbell, author of
The Face of the Earth: Natural Landscapes, Science, and Culture “Time and again I found articles, essays, and poems working together like facets of a prism, a succeeding work illuminating the one before it and setting up resonances with the one to follow.”—Robert Root, author of
Postscripts: Retrospections on Time and PlaceTable of ContentsIntroduction: An Alignment of Stones
Part 1. Ground Truths
A World of Islands
Elizabeth Dodd
Three Stations along the Ring of Fire
O. Alan Weltzien
The Deepest Layer
Harmon Maher
Deep Mapping Communities in the West of Ireland
Nessa Cronin
Where Narratives Met: Microplace and Macrospace in Early Fascist Primary School Textbooks and the Case of Eugenio Cirese’s Gente buona (1925)
Fabiana Dimpflmeier
Imagining the Memory of the Earth: Geo-Site and the Aesthetic of the Anthropocene
Andrea Benassi
Cacophonous Silence (The Sound of Falling Wildly): A Transnational Experiment in Ecological Performance Poiesis
Jess Allen and Bronwyn Preece
Poetry 1: Ground Truths
Meadows and Fireflies
Aliki Barnstone
Sonora Desert: Winter Afternoon Singing Itself
Alberto Ríos
Too Easy
Greg Delanty
Communion
Twyla Hansen
Strata Songs: Galway and Arizona
Susan Millar DuMars
Sutra, in Umber
Kimberly Blaeser
After Taiwan
Kimberly Blaeser
Birth of a Nation
Colm Tóibín
Encounter
Tess Gallagher
Matters of Geneva
Dawn Dupler
The Course of the Peculiar
Michael Heffernan
Tsé Bit’a’í
Christine Casson
Konza Prairie
O. Alan Weltzien
Glaciers, Mountains, Falls
David Brannan
Part 2. Watershed Ways
Braided Channels of Watershed Consciousness: Loren Eiseley’s “The Flow of the River” and the Platte Basin Timelapse Project
Tom Lynch
Plovers, Great Blues, Horned Owl: A Poet’s Ecotone
Brendan Galvin
Superior: Reimagining the Interior of a Continent
Susan Naramore Maher
Pathways of the Yellowstone
Bernard Quetchenbach
The Proximity of Far Away: Climate Change Comes to the Alligator
Rick Van Noy
What You Take from the Sea
Mary Swander
Recontinentalizing Europe: Terrestrial Conversion and Symbolic Exchanges at Europe’s Mediterranean Frontier
Emilio Cocco
Poetry 2: Watershed Ways
With a Hurricane, She Climbs Mountains while She Dreams
Pam Uschuk
The Mighty Mississippi
Twyla Hansen
Mississippi Delta Lay Down
Ann Fisher-Wirth
Links
Brendan Galvin
By the Sea
David Lloyd
Aubade
William Logan
River Dolphins
Michael S. Begnal
Sruth Fada Con
Barry Johnston
Wanting Choughs
Tony Curtis
Double View of the Adirondacks as Reflected over Lake Champlain from Waterfront
Park
Major Jackson
Portage
Alice Azure
Part 3. Planetary Currents
The Lariat and the GPS: Cowboys, Cattle Ranching, and Global Agricultural Practices
Nancy S. Cook
Life on the Western Edge of It All: Conceptions of Place in Tess Gallagher’s Lough Arrow Poems
Drucilla Wall
Return to Finland, Robert Creeley, Continental Drift
Eamonn Wall
Excerpts from COSMOGRAPHY: Re-Minding Our Place in the Universe
Joel Weishaus
Poetry 3: Planetary Currents
Asking Why
Marge Saiser
The Dark Sky Reserve
Heid E. Erdrich
Ornithological Perspectives
Walter Bargen
Spiritus Mundi
Greg Delanty
Strange
Aliki Barnstone
Killer Butterfly
Walter Bargen
When the Body
Linda Hogan
What I Keep
Linda Hogan
War Memorial
Katherine Soniat
Bulk
Daniel Tobin
All Hallows’ Eve, County Mayo
Joan McBreen
As the Diamond
Tess Gallagher
The Burden of Theology
Kelly Cherry
A Line from Dogen
Walter Bargen
Contributors
