Climate

by Julie Carr, Lisa Olstein

We could try writing letters, one of us said to the other after our cross-country trip was over and we weren't done talking. Talking about hurricanes, fires, floods, droughts, freezes. About shootings, bombings, border crises, #MeToo. Jewishness, whiteness, feminism. Fear, ambition, desire. Work, marriage, friendship. Grief, anger, illness, and suicide. At once anecdotal, philosophical, political, and deeply personal, the letters quickly come to sustain a different kind of present a way of finding self through other, a portal into urgent and shared contemplation, a means of saying what otherwise feels unsayable. Propelled by events both public and private, these epistolary essays comprise a catalog of living with and thinking through the climatic disturbances that determine our lives. Finding kinship in other epistolary exchanges, from Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs to Etel Adnan's Of Cities and Women to Martin Land and Jonathan Boyarin's Time and Human Language Now, they inhabit the experiment of talking and listening in the unspooling, untenable now, while exploring what it means to be an "I" and a "you" in the alternate present letters invent. Literary Nonfiction.

152 pages, Paperback

Published May 31, 2022

Reviews

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

What could possibly be better than to be witness to, engaged in, a fly on the wall for the conversation between two truly brilliant minds? This book contains so much vulnerability, so much daring, so much arrived-at insight. It made me feel — better, strangely.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely superb. I’m so glad I found this book and, in these women, brilliant and heartfelt and profound meditations on what, exactly, our life in this moment is and means. I want everyone to read this.

In the authors’ words, this book is about:
“…the intersection of public and private, witnessed and solitary, intimate and shared, combined with this transformative unselfconsciousness”

“…a certain kind of companionship…an enactment of searching together with, to, through our microclimates, these presents, these I’s and you’s”

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Came to me at a time that I very much needed to feel seen and less alone in my climate anxiety/rage

Two poet-academics writing letters to each other about their daily lives and feelings about news of the moment (2018-2019). A wonderful read, it’s a complete fluke that I came to read this book - I’m so glad I did.

“Have we spoken about "carbon removal"? Do you believe in that? It's the only thing that gives me hope. It's a kind of hope that includes what seems inevitable: the loss of coastal cities, the uninhabitable portions of the earth, more war, more migration crises. My "hope," if you want to call it that, is cast so far into the future that it has nothing to do with our generation or our kids or their kids or grandkids. But it helps me to, survive the time we are living to think that eventually, humans reimagine, rebuild. Maybe this is not different from believing in God. An afterlife.”