A student in my recent “Twenty-First Century African American Literature” seminar insisted, “We should stop using the phrase ‘Experimental Literature.’ All creative writing is an experiment.” This is true, but…
Contemporaries Essays
Severance, Stuckness, and the Hurricane Fix
This essay focuses on a fleeting climate crisis event in Ling Ma’s 2018 novel Severance. For super smart critical work on Severance you should go to the Post-45 cluster on…
On Being Stuck at Customs: The Poems of Solmaz Sharif
Solmaz, have you thanked your executioner today? — “Social Skills Training”1 These are the first questions I received after giving a virtual talk on my book Climate Lyricism: Aren’t the…
“Of course, the world continues to end”: Weather and the Climate Crisis Ordinary
The sense of slow-motion apocalypse indexed in my title, spoken by a character in Jenny Offill’s 2020 novel Weather, resonates widely. In early 2020 — just a few weeks before…
Dyspossession: Notes on the Black Commons
In the abolitionist radical David Walker’s 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, he offers an anecdote about the difficulties Black people in the United States have acquiring…
Tim Kaine’s Orange; or, Stuck in Traffic
Last January, in yet another sign, perhaps, of the shifting weather patterns and intensified storm systems caused by global warming, a fierce snowstorm stranded hundreds of motorists along a 50-mile…
Stuck with Each Other: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora
Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2015 novel Aurora is many things, but you might, if you’re very irritated, characterize it as a very long book about how hard it is to be…