Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time

by Tom Lynch (Editor), Susan Naramore Maher (Editor), Drucilla Wall (Editor)

In 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. Reckoning with the larger matrix of biome, region, continent, hemisphere, ocean, and planet has become necessary as environmental challenges require the insights not only of scientists but also of poets, humanists, and social scientists. Thinking Continental  braids together abstract approaches with strands of more-personal narrative and poetry, showing how our imaginations can encompass the planetary while also being true to our own concrete life experiences in the here and now.

378 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2017

Reviews

[Bonnye Reed · Rating 5 out of 5]

GNA This is an extraordinary collection of essays concerning our planet Earth, one that it is hard to put down and impossible to argue against. I would recommend to both climate change believers and those still refusing to see the rapidly changing world we will have to live in down the road unless drastic changes in our lifestyles are made now. It is impossible to pick out a favorite so you will just need to read them all.

I received a free electronic copy of this collection of essays from various authors, editor Susan Naramore Maher, Netgalley and University of Nebraska Press in exchange for an honest review. Thank you all for sharing your work with me.
pub date Nov 1, 2017
University of Nebraska Press

Not available B&N 11-7-17

[Lulu Joanis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Utilized as supplemental reading for my Writing the Environment class a few semesters ago. "Deep Mapping Communities in the West of Ireland" by Nessa Cronin served as a template for an interactive presentation my peers and I presented at a liberal arts conference; we also read "Plovers, Great Blues, Horned Owl: A Poet's Ecotone" as an example of creative nonfiction (the only essay included without citations and a bibliography) which remained memorable. Other than that, we hadn't read anything else from it, and I wanted to get my money's worth; as good a time as any, as I've been on an anthology binge since quarantine, probably because of its academic merit, as well as its much-needed dynamism.

This anthology is divided into three sections: one focusing on land, water, and air, respectively, and within these, two subsections, one of prose (mostly critical essays) and the other of poetry (although there is overlap; see: dynamism). There is also a lot of intertextuality between the texts, such as similarity of region, topic, and conclusion, although there exists some conflict between them as well, which makes it easy (in the sense that the book is otherwise challenging but rewarding) to personalize and understand a lot of the objective texts in a subjective and artistic way.

There were quite a lot of examples that made an otherwise academic anthology shine; most of the poetry, for one, and those that did not still provided a nice counterpoint to the rest: I'm unsure if I thought of some of them as duds because of their merit, or because I've fallen victim to the harmful status equating "cliche" with the earnest love of natural locales. So, in either case, they remain memorable and requite further contemplation. Some favorites of the prose, which forms the bulk of the anthology, include

- "Where Narratives Met: Microplace and Macrospace in Early Fascist Primary School Textbooks and the Case of Eugenio Cirese's "Gente buona" (1925)" by Fabiana Dimpflmeier; the subject matter of this one is so interesting, and the writing propels an otherwise dry academic essay forward with force:

- "Recontinentalizing Europe: Terrestrial Conversion and Symbolic Exchanges at Europe's Mediterranean Frontier" by Emilio Cocco, which forms a manifesto regarding border enforcement and heterogeneity (which is, ironically, the same prefix of the antonym, one of the least diverse, and most combative toward diverse cultural forces in the world right now: heterosexuality)

- and "Excerpts from COSMOGRAPHY: Re-Minding Our Place in the Universe", mixing together poetry and prose, epigraph with epic poem, weaving together bits and pieces from a variety of other works and the author's own words; kind of inexplicable, but it reminded me a lot of House of Leaves, but the citations are non-fiction

Some lowlights or duds, though, included "Cacophonous Silence (The Sound of Falling Wildly): A Transnational Experiment in Ecological Performance Poiesis", which struck me as really self-involved and masturbatory; as well as "Return to Finland, Robert Creely, Contintental Drift" which felt disorganized and lacked a central thesis, in my opinion, besides a short memoir of the author's life, which is unnecessary given the educational context of the book itself.

Other than that, some of it was quite dull, while other parts gave me whiplash; the cross-talk between poetry and prose works in theory, but in practice they did not mesh that well, and only divided the three sections from each other, resisting intertextuality on that front: and that's strange, because a book promising to "Writ[e] the Planet One Place At a Time" should not compartmentalize three elements from each other, but the organization of the poetry does that. I also believe that saying the book was dull at times is a fair complaint, since by including the poetry, it brands itself as more than just an academic anthology, and becomes a coherent, commercial reading experience. To me, though, it partially succeeds, and partially fails at that.

[World Literature Today]

"None can deny that we live in an age of incredible change. 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. Thinking Continental contains a variety of genres to appeal to many readers, but it would be particularly apt as an academic text for a sustainability or environmental literature course or as a supplemental text in an ecology, sociology, or economics course. " - Greg Brown

This book was reviewed in the Mar/Apr 2018 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website:

https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/...