Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time ed. by Tom Lynch et al. (review)

"I see—New Englandly," Emily Dickinson observed, imagining place not as a noun but an adverb, a way of being. The poet also saw Darwinly, saw through the comforts of a planetary Plan: "Four Trees—upon a solitary Acre—/Without Design / Or Order, or Apparent Action—/Maintain—…" The admirable collection Thinking Continental likewise sees place, and places, adverbially and multifocally. It's bracing to open a book and find geologists and geographers alongside poets, and it's a superior entertainment to link essays with other essays and also with poems. O. Alan Weltzien contributes both an essay and a riprap vista poem to the collection. Bernard Quetchenbach articulates the figure of migration, Susan Naramore Maher (among others) narrates it, and the poet Alberto Rios lyrically reconfigures it. Harmon Maher's survey of the geological figure of layering helps us situate Nessa Cronin's project of "deep mapping." (See also the poems that dig or climb down or look up.) In his essay Emilio Cocco asks us to imagine the ocean as more than the absence of landforms, a viewpoint shared-on the North Atlantic's western edge-by Brendan Galvin and missing from the fascinating but more familiar oceanic perspectives of David Lloyd's poem and Drucilla Wall's essay. Especially refreshing to me are the various decenterings of anthropocentric standpoints, the struggles to see not just regionally but as a mare (Gallagher), a whale (Galvin), a crow (Hogan), or even a slug (Johnston).

In their introduction, the editors seek to bridge the local (e.g., Wendell Berry) with the global (e.g., Ursula Heise). Amid the quiet and roaring devastations of climate change, they prudently remark that to respond to the "new abnormal" (Jerry Brown's term) will "require keen insights not only of scientists but of poets, humanists, and social scientists as well" (xv). To the elements of earth and water, I would add air and fire. (I'm writing in the toxic-smoked East Bay with my Camp Fire face mask on my knee.) And to the markers of the past I would add guideposts and warning flashers pointing toward alternative, (un)sustainable futures. A number of these essays and poems take up, or at least acknowledge, the elephant in the room. Rick Van Noy (following the gradations of Yale E360) charts the degrees of human denial in the subsiding banks and joking bars ("laughing it off" being a common way of deflecting environmental concerns) of the Alligator River. Aliki Barnstone in "Strange" misses her cold-snapped butterfly bush and then zooms out to "the climate chaos" of the contorted "Arctic vortex" (316). The choreographed inscriptions of the young pair of performance artists Jess Allen and Brownyn Preece, though stilted on the page (on Vimeo, there the dance is), adds an activist ecopoetics to this collection. But we don't need only ecological essays or poems or performance pieces to show readers how to reach the planet beneath their phones. The disconnect with nature is taken up in Walter Bargen's darkly witty "Killer Butterfly." And a number of nature essays (by Elizabeth Dodd, Brendan Galvin, to name two) and poems (by Michael S. Begnal, Heid Erdrich, Tess Gallagher) make the exploration and inhabitation of undomesticated places seem irresistible.

At some points, though, I find the climate reference frame weirdly missing. If Cocco wants us to reimagine borders from an oceanic perspective, he would also have us see the sea as a swelling, acidifying, overheating carbon sink, a vast waste bin for European landforms. When Nancy S. Cook asserts that "ranching in the American West remains a business, a valuable one for the planet" (268), she might mention the extra-large carbon bootprint of cattle ranching or, looking south, might concede that cattle ranching has promoted Amazon deforestation or say something about green(er) ranching. Mt. Rainier's glaciers are melting...