Summary

north by north/west is a hybrid work of creative nonfiction assembled as several iterative sequences—a discontinuous itinerary—of exile. Harnessing both montage and collage to represent the incohesive experience of being between cultures, categories, and language, this book is a personal, critical, and autoethnographic exploration of diasporic identity formation and creative expression amidst the cultural and political impacts of Cold War colonialism and fragmentation. As the narrator begins work on a rough translation of the 1959 film North by Northwest, focal points surface through textual correspondences with distant coordinates, shifting between close readings of Whitney Houston’s early music videos, current events reportage, illness journals, eighties spy movies, the most recent solar eclipse, Alfred Hitchcock’s unproduced films, Cold War “stay-behind operations,” an ill-fated party at the Festival de Cannes, and family accounts of migration. These meticulously arranged narrative threads—harnessing elements of a novel alongside poetry, photographs, and field notes—attempt to discompose the epistemology of the West/Global North in order to conceptualize a genre of work by the children of exiles who have been called “the post-dictatorship generation.” 

Contents

VHS (translator’s note)

I was born unfinished

< sequence 1

interlude /

a second (sequence) >

we the people

matt damon’s resemblance (a sonata)

what is a title page?

a brief layover (cary grant with his pants down)

close, up

Author

Chris Campanioni was born in Manhattan and grew up in a very nineties New Jersey. The son of exiles from Cuba and Poland, Campanioni is a writer, multimedia artist, and instructor. He is a recipient of the International Latino Book Award for his debut novel, Going Down (Aignos, 2013); the Pushcart Prize for “Soft Opening” from his cross-genre collection Death of Art (C&R Press, 2016); and the 2013 Academy of American Poets College Prize. 

Reviews

"For Chris Campanioni, memory is a kind of rewinding of the tape of one’s life—a tape whose production we rarely have a say in—but the rewinding is power in itself as it keeps alive something irrevocably lost."
—Eric Dean Wilson, author of After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort

"Chris Campanioni’s north by north/west is a conceptually roving surveillance of the self through the language of technology and mechanical reproduction. Evading classification at every turn, this deeply associative text is migratory and nationless, if genre can be understood as a state from which to emigrate. Campanioni’s writing—in the form of personal and intellectual contraband—deepens and dazzles in this remarkable performance."
—Richard Scott Larson, author of The Long Hallway

"This work is a tour-de-force of creative critical praxis, a work that establishes a new genre for exiles and immigrants, a machine for generating ideas and encouraging speculation. north by north/west is constantly positing what it might be and do by questioning labels, genres, and sources in ways that open up current academic discourse. There is nothing else that I know of quite like this. "
—Christine Hume, author of Everything I Never Wanted to Know 

Summary

Dispatch from the Mountain State encompasses the trademark themes of a mature poet—death, despair, dread, and the seeming randomness with which all of these come into life. The dispatches provide, if sometimes obliquely, a keen awareness of the troubled times within which we live, whether the flashpoint be race, the recent pandemic, or the reckless onslaught of the Appalachian mining industry, which is masterfully addressed in the long poem, “The Breach.” Harshman’s distinctive vision remains both surreal and familiar, whether expressed in a sonnet or the more common free-verse characteristic of most of his work. 

This collection of over forty poems sings with a fluid voice and dazzles with imagery that surprises and rings true, often underlain by and intertwined with the darker threads of our common living and dying as contemporary Appalachians. It is rare to find a poet like Harshman, who is deeply connected to the life of rural America and yet writes poetry untouched by any sentiment for the old ways found there. 

Contents

Acknowledgments

First

Dispatch from the Mountain State

The Apple Trees Were in Blossom

River

Beech Bottom, West Virginia

Hunger

This Light

Black and White

Reading 

Storm Lyrics

Some Day

Polly

Taking It All on Faith

Dancing Below the Curious Hills

Once More Home

Second

Ancestry

I Come to the Garden Alone

Where She Lives

Well Enough

Wake

Headlines

The Door Open

Back to the Garden

Jackson Pollock and the Starlings . . . 

Insomnia

Chapel    

Tinnitus

Astonished

Flight Behavior

Haying    

Politics

Blue in Green    

Grandmother Loved to Dance    

Late October    

Skeletal

Beauty and . . . 

Third

A Breach

Fourth

Heart Work

Just Outside the Grocery a Boy with a Gun

April 17, Romney Road

Not a Boy Scout

Surrender

Nowhere Beyond

The News and the History

Reminders
 

Author

Marc Harshman is poet laureate of West Virginia. He has published eight collections of poetry, including the award-winning titles Woman in Red Anorak and Believe What You Can. He is also the author/coauthor of fourteen children’s books. Harshman was recently named the Appalachian Heritage Writer for 2024 by Shepherd University’s Appalachian Studies program. He holds degrees from Bethany College, Yale Divinity School, and the University of Pittsburgh. He lives in Wheeling. 

Reviews

"In these necessary poems, Marc Harshman masterfully travels the vast chasm between a full life and everything dead but still remembered, providing fortunate readers with a blueprint, a map, a simple reason to keep climbing, no matter how many apple trees throw us down, proving yet again, there is no substitute for experience. And there is no experience too big or small for words."
—Frank X Walker, author of Load in Nine Times: Poems and Affrilachia: Poems

"Marc Harshman has long been one of our best poets but with Dispatch from the Mountain State he achieves new heights. This is epic storytelling told in intimate moments that articulate the complex heart of Appalachia through unforgettable imagery and keen observations. A stunning, heartbreaking, and ultimately healing collection." 
—Silas House, Kentucky Poet Laureate

"Unflinching, Dispatch from the Mountain State wrestles with contemporary chaos, but illuminates the sweet stillness alive under it; mourns our desecrated natural world, but reminds us it’s the sacred that’s eternal.  The sequence 'The Breach' is possibly the most original and unforgettable poetic treatment of water and extractive industries I have ever read."  
—Ann Pancake, author of Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley: Novellas and Stories

Praise for Believe What You Can (2018, WVU Press):  “Believe What You Can overflows with rich lines and vivid images as the poet laureate of West Virginia speaks to classic concerns of loving the land, struggling to thrive, and holding on to what can be believed.”
—Ron Houchin, author of The Man Who Saws Us In Half: Poems

Summary

In the first book-length study of Paula Meehan, one of Ireland’s leading contemporary poets emerges as an original voice whose perspectives on gender, class, and ecology are transforming the Irish literary landscape and beyond. Drawing on her own lived experience as a practicing poet, Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick explores how scholarship is grounded in an imaginative exchange between the words on the page and the material conditions of the scholar who works to inhabit them. With chapters of literary analysis swimming in a conversation between two poets, this book breaches the boundaries between criticism and memoir, suggesting ways that every scholar is transformed by the subjects they study. 
In Paula Meehan, Kirkpatrick has found a powerful poet to both study and love, and her reading of Meehan’s poetry and prose through the lenses of gender studies, the environmental humanities, and social class offers a passionate endorsement of Meehan’s radical interventions in the canon of Irish poetry. This work explores eight volumes of Meehan’s poetry, including Dharmakaya, Painting Rain, and Geomantic. 

Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: In Medias Res
Chapter 1: Witnessing Class Trauma
Chapter 2: Resisting Environmental Injustice
Chapter 3:
Toward an Animistic Vision
Chapter 4: Restoring the Garden
Chapter 5: Beyond Human Exceptionalism
Chapter 6:The Shamanic Poet
Afterword
Works Cited
Index
 

Author

Kathryn Kirkpatrick is professor of English at Appalachian State University. She is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently The Fisher Queen: New & Selected Poems, as well as the editor of Border Crossings: Irish Women Writers and National Identities and co-editor of Animals in Irish Literature and Culture.

Reviews

"A polished, moving, deeply intelligent study of Paula Meehan’s poetry, which goes beyond a single poet’s life and work to illuminate an entire culture....I am unaware of another seriously academic study of a contemporary poet’s work written by another poet."

—Maureen O’Connor, University College Cork and author of Edna O’Brien and the Art of Fiction

Summary

Blue Basin Island is the final resting spot of formerly enslaved Africans whose souls have flown from Earth—not to heaven or purgatory but toward freedom and a new life. Lucille, the island’s seamstress, takes two forms. She lives among the inhabitants in human form and, along with the evil-repelling blue of the houses, her divine form protects people from the violence of the their former lives. Yet, even there, outside of time, the souls are not totally insulated from the world in which they were enslaved. Each time a Black person anywhere is harmed, a piece of Blue Basin disintegrates: an earthquake leaves hundreds of thousands dead, and bricks crumble on the island; when police kill a Black child asleep in her bed, the blue paint on homes throughout the island drips and then runs from the walls. Lucille must hold the island together, but she struggles to juggle the responsibility of ensuring everyone’s safety while also seeking and losing her own private love. Grounding the story in African folklore and dipping into the rich literary tradition around African people with the power of flight, Zoë Gadegbeku visualizes the destination at the end of the flight and the new life that awaits them.
 

Author

Zoë Gadegbeku is a Ghanaian writer. She received an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College and was a fellow at the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. Her writing has appeared in Saraba magazine, AFREADA, Blackbird, The Washington Post, and the anthology Pan African Spaces: Essays on Black Transnationalism. This is her first book. 

Reviews

"Blue Futures, Break Open is a challenging, dazzling novel, combining elements of allegory, poetry, history, and folktales. It levitates as it decenters, gesturing toward and embodying unquantifiable resilience and loss."
 —Foreword Reviews (starred review)

“Beautifully written . . . Blue Futures, Break Open speaks to the power and possibility of women’s self-determination to shape fate.”
—Kirsten Imani Kasai, author of The House of Erzulie

“There is something rooted in history, far and recent, in this book – a truth that should be shared. Even in paradise, the pains and realities of these pasts in some ways remain inescapable.” 
—Morgan Christie, author of These Bodies

Summary

William Delisle Hay’s The Doom of the Great City (1880) imagines the destruction of London as a result of human-induced environmental devastation, the threat of which is becoming increasingly visible today. This urban apocalypse narrative connects to pressing cultural discussions on global warming, modern life in cities, public health, and the interconnectivity of human life on earth. This first critical edition of Hay’s novella makes available his account of one man’s tale of survival amidst a toxic fog—a survival that includes his relocation to Maoriland in New Zealand. The editors foreground the relevance of the story to present and future pandemics, the persistence of environmental disasters, and the global population’s ongoing migration to cities. They place the narrative in dialogue with nineteenth-century concerns about climate change, pollution, natural resources, health care, empire, and (sub)urbanization that have remained significant challenges as we come to terms with the lasting impacts of the Anthropocene in the twenty-first century.  

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on the Text

Introduction by Michael Kramp and Sarita Jayanty Mizin

Selected Bibliography and Additional Reading

The Doom of the Great City (1880)

Appendix A. Nineteenth-Century Writing on Climate Change

1. David Ansted and Robert Drummond, from “Weather” (1860)

2. Louis Agassiz, from “The Formation of Glaciers” (1863)

3. Richard Jefferies, from “The Great Snow” (c. 1876)

4. Svante Arrhenius, from “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground” (1896)

Appendix B. Global Perspectives on the City

1. Mirza Salih Shirazi, from The Collected Journeys of Mirza Salih Shirazi (1815)

2. Mary Seacole, from Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857)

3. Rudyard Kipling, from “The City of Dreadful Night” (1885)

4. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, from Sultana’s Dream (1905)

5. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, from “Interview to ‘The News Chronicle’” (1931)

Appendix C. The London Fog

1. Francis Albert Rollo Russell, from London Fogs (1880)

2. Robert Barr, from “The Doom of London” (1892)

3. From “Metropolitan Atmospheric Pollution” (1880)

4. “A London Fog” (1849)

Appendix D. Victorian Public Health

1. Edwin Chadwick, from Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842)

2. Florence Nightingale, from Notes on Nursing for the Labouring Classes (1861)

3. Charles Kingsley, from “The Science of Health” (1874)

4. “The Peril in the Air,” Peps Company (1913)

Appendix E. Victorian Suburbanization

1. George and Weedon Grossmith, from The Diary of a Nobody (1892)

2. Thomas Runciman, from “London City Suburbs” (1893)

3. Ella Hepworth Dixon, from The Story of a Modern Woman (1894)

4. T.W.H. Crosland, from The Suburbans (1905)

5. Bacon’s Library Map of London and Suburbs, sheet 5 (1877)

Appendix F. Visions of the End

1. Mary Shelley, from The Last Man (1826)

2. George Griffith, from The Angel of the Revolution: A Tale of the Coming Terror (1893)

3. M. P. Shiel, from The Purple Cloud (1901)

Acknowledgments
 

Editors

Michael Kramp is professor of English at Lehigh University, where he is a scholar of nineteenth-century British literature, critical theory, and masculinity studies. He is the author of Patriarchy’s Creative Resilience and Disciplining Love: Austen and the Modern Man. 

Sarita Jayanty Mizin is assistant professor of English and faculty director of the Intersectional Women’s Center in the department of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. 

Together, they are coediting a new edition of Richard Jeffries’ After London (1885).

Reviews

"This edition is an exemplary model of how to introduce students, scholars, and new readers alike to a little-known nineteenth-century text. The careful and attentive way in which the editors have negotiated the novella's imperial framing and settler-colonial context is impressive."  
—Porscha Fermanis, professor, University College Dublin and author of Romantic Pasts: History, Fiction, and Feeling in Britain, 1790-1850

Summary

2024 Weatherford Award Winner, Nonfiction

This Book Is Free and Yours to Keep presents an engaging collection of letters and artwork by people in prison that highlights the crucial work done by the Appalachian Prison Book Project (APBP), a nonprofit that provides books to incarcerated people in West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland. Through the words of people directly impacted by the criminal punishment system, the collection provides uncommon insight into reading practices and everyday life in prisons and jails while being an inspiration for prison book projects, prison reform, and abolition.

Simultaneously communicating the vital importance of access to books and education, and conveying the power of community, the letters sent to APBP by incarcerated people spark conversations about racism, poverty, and incarceration and shed light on the movement for accountability for state violence. This Book Is Free and Yours to Keep elucidates the violence and neglect perpetuated by carceral systems and offers a way forward based on solidarity and collaboration.   

Contents

Preface
Introduction
Editorial Statement

1.  Book Requests

2. Access and Restrictions

3. Letters as Windows

4. Circles, Classes, Conversations

5. Weaving Webs

Where Is the Honey?

Afterword
Works Cited
Resource List
Acknowledgments

Author

Connie Banta is a social activist serving on the APBP Board of Directors, book artist, poet, and retired therapist living in Morgantown, WV. Kristin DeVault-Juelfs is a social worker, therapist, and former APBP work-study student and APBP volunteer from West Virginia. Destinee Harper is a researcher and activist for education access in prison. Katy Ryan is a literature professor and founder of APBP. Ellen Skirvin is a teacher, fiction writer, and dedicated APBP volunteer. 

Reviews

“A beautiful book that really stands alone in literature exploring mass incarceration, the experience of incarceration, and the work of reform. As the editors note, this isn’t really a book about any of those things in a traditional sense, even as it clearly is a book about all of them. Rather, the book is most clearly about the literary and intellectual lives of people incarcerated and the modest but urgent work of grassroots book projects.”
—Judah Schept, author of Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Kentucky

"Switching between the author's description of the APBP program and the prisoners' own words, readers will gain insight into how access to reading materials creates opportunities for learning, and, more importantly, helps inmates develop a sense of self and to expand their understanding of their lives, their situations, and the larger world outside of prison." 
—Lisa Hussey, professor of library and information science, Simmons College

Summary

Introducing the concepts of d-ecocinema and d-ecocinema criticism, Monani expands the purview of ecocinema studies and not only brings attention to a thriving Indigenous cinema archive but also argues for a methodological approach that ushers Indigenous intellectual voices front and center in how we theorize this archive. Its case-study focus on Canada, particularly the work emanating from the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival in Toronto--a nationally and internationally recognized hub in Indigenous cinema networks--provides insights into pan-Indigenous and Nation-specific contexts of Indigenous ecocinema.

This absorbing text is the first book-length exploration foregrounding the environmental dimensions of cinema made by Indigenous peoples, including a particlarly fascinating discussion on how Indigenous cinema’s ecological entanglements are a crucial and complementary aspect of its agenda of decolonialism.

Contents

List of Illustrations
Land Acknowledgments
A Glossary Clarifying the Use of Terms

INTRODUCING D-ECOCINEMA

Introduction

1. D-ecocinema Criticism: Reclaiming Indigenous Eco-Agency

PLACE

2. (Re)rooting Indigenous Place: The ImagineNATIVE Film and Media Festival

3. (Re)growing The World: imagineNATIVE as In-Person and Remote Festival

TIME

4. Timely Interventions: Indigenous Cinema Time(s)

5. Snipping and Glitching Colonial Time: The Films of Terril Calder and Caroline Monnet

FEELINGS

6. Indigenous Affects: Cinematic Humor’s Earthly Embodiments

7. Laughter to Breathe: The Films of Zoe Hopkins and Shelley Niro

Epilogue: Growing D-ecocinema Criticism and Engagement

Acknowledgments

Notes
Bibliography

Index

Author

Salma Monani is a professor at Gettysburg College’s Environmental Studies department. She has extensively published in ecocinema studies, Indigenous ecomedia, and environmental justice. She is co-editor of four ecocritical media anthologies. As part of her College’s Land Acknowledgment Committee, she also engages in public eco-humanities along with community research with Indigenous partners.

Reviews

“Indigenous Ecocinema is a deeply considered, meticulously researched, and cogently reasoned text. Monani’s approach to Indigenous cinema is situated within multiple critical conversations while maintaining a clear and consistent original intervention. She engages cinema from a variety of angles, not limiting herself to the ‘text’ of the film itself, but also considering the filmmakers’ contexts as well as the influence of the venue and audience participating in the screening. I found this study to be compelling and exciting.”
— Amy Hamilton, author of Peregrinations: Walking in American Literature

“A much-needed addition to the fast-growing fields of Indigenous media and ecocinema studies.  Well-written, with both substantive theoretical heft and, at the same time, a warm and inviting tone and a very readable style, the arguments Monani makes around issues of place, time, and affect comprise a compelling case for the centrality of Indigenous cinematic mediations of ecological consciousness.” 
—Joanna Hearne, author of Native Recognition: Indigenous Cinema and the Western and Smoke Signals: Native Cinema Rising 
 

Summary

2024 ASEH George Perkins Marsh Prize Runner-up

What happened to the loggers of America’s past when lumbermen moved west and south in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How did these communities continue to create value and meaning in these marginal lands? Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest provides a new perspective on the process of industrialization in America through the study of rural workers in a cutover landscape. 

Back when resources started running scarce, the environment of the forest and bodies of workers became the natural resources from which mills and landowners extracted. Bodies and cutover landscapes were mobilized in new ways to increase the scale and efficiency of production—a brutal process for workers, human and animal alike. In the Northern Forest, an industrial working class formed in relation to the unique ways that workers' bodies were used to produce value and in relation to the seasonal cycles of the forest environment.

Cutover Capitalism is an innovative historical study that combines methodological approaches from labor history, environmental history, and the new history of capitalism. The book tells a character-driven yet theoretically sophisticated story about what it was like to live through this process of industrialization.

Contents

List of photographs, maps, tables, charts, or other illustrative materials
Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Work of Trees

2.  Common Labor, Common Lands

3. A Chance

Interlude: Organic Networks

4. The Winter Workscape: Industrializing with Ice

5. The Body as Cheap Nature

6. The Lumberjack Problem

7. Half-Wild Folk

Epilogue: Land, Labor, and Local History
Bibliography
Endnotes

Index

Author

Jason L. Newton, PhD, is an historian of modern America specializing in the history of capitalism, labor, and the environment. He is currently an assistant teaching professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Reviews

“Blurring the boundary between exploiting trees and exploiting workers, Cutover Capitalism is an interesting re-interpretation of the field of forest history, a discipline that has focused all too heavily on woods technology and not enough on labor process.”
— Richard Judd, author of Second Nature: An Environmental History of New England

"A conceptually brilliant history that instantly becomes critically important for both labor and environmental historians." 
— Erik Loomis, author of A History of American in Ten Strikes

"With this compelling study, Jason Newton achieves an impressive disciplinary synthesis that casts new light on land and life in northern New England. Cutover Capitalism is a must-read for forest and environmental historians—and many more besides. Insights drawn from memory studies, the history of capitalism, labor history, ecology, and experience reveal much about the exploitation of people and non-human nature in the past, and raise important questions about the injustices and sustainability of our current circumstances." 
— Graeme Wynn, author of Environment, Power, and Justice: Southern African Histories

Summary

Winner, ASLE-UKI Critical Book Prize, 2025
Finalist, Ecocritical Book Award, 2025
Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE)
Longlisted, Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing, 2025

As climate crisis ensues, a transition away from fossil fuels becomes urgent. However, some renewable energy developments are propagating injustices such as landgrabs, colonial dispossession, and environmentally destructive practices. Changing the way we imagine and understand wind will help us ensure a globally just wind energy future. 

Saharan Winds contributes to a fairer energy horizon by illuminating the role of imaginaries—how we understand energy sources such as wind and the meanings we attach to wind—in determining the wider politics, whether oppressive or just, associated with energy systems. This book turns to various cultures and communities across different time periods in Western Sahara to explore how wind imaginaries affect the development, management, and promotion of wind farms; the distribution of energy that wind farms produce; and, vitally, the type of politics mediated by all these elements combined. Highlighting the wind-fueled oppression of colonial energy systems, the book shows the potential offered by nomadic, Indigenous wind imaginaries for contributing to a fairer energy future.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Sea without Water: Navigators, Traders, and Wind Pathologies in Western Sahara

2. The Red Wind: Aeolian Anxieties and Energy Infrastructure in Spanish Sahara

3. The Tamed Winds: Siemens and Settler Colonialism in Moroccan-Occupied Western Sahara

4. The Tallīya: Saharawi Perceptions of an Oppressive Energoregime

5. The Gallāba: Windblown Desertscapes and the Friendship Generation

6. The Īrīfī: Wind as Harbinger in Arabic-Language Cultural Production

7. The Gblīya: Electricity in the Camps and a Nomadic Energy Future

8.  The Sirocco: Saharan Winds and Solidarity in Spanish Writing and Art

Conclusion: The Ǧalūāǧ

Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Author

Joanna Allan is an associate professor in global development at Northumbria University, UK. 

Reviews

"The mixture of archival, literary and fieldwork-derived ethnographic material is innovative and inspiring within the field of energy humanities."
—Dominic Boyer, author of Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene

"A novel approach into the intersection between colonialism and wind energy extraction."
—Alexander Dunlap, coeditor of Enforcing Ecocide: Power, Policing & Planetary Militarization