About the Book
Air, Volume 2 of the 5-VolumeElementalsseries, is a stunning collection of essays, poetry, and stories that illuminate the dynamic relationships between people and place, human and nonhuman life, mind and the material world, and the living energies that make all life possible.
Infinite and always in motion, constituent of everything, air is unutterably old, and its spirit carries with it the story of everything. What to make of a thing as ineffable as air? The stories and poems in this volume weave a web of words that gives us room to breathe more openly, providing spaces where the imagination can thrive. Welcome to Air. The Elementals series explores how people from various cultures across the planet have worked with these powerful forces of change and regeneration to shape landscapes and deepen personal and place-based relationships.
Contributors forAir, Volume 2include: Gavin Van Horn Bruce Jennings Daegan Miller Aimee Nezhukumatahil Sohini Basak Andrew S. Yang Ellen Bass Darran Anderson Nicholas Triolo Felicia Zamora Sara Beck Michele Wick Ross Gay Roy Scranton Antonia Malchik Benjamin Kunkel Rita Dove By Akmolfe Craig Santos Perez Gabrielle Bellot
With compelling stories and insightful reflections,Air, Volume 2reveals how people are working with, adapting to, and cocreating relational depth and ecological diversity by respectfully attending to the atmospheric forces that shape our everyday worlds.
Proceeds from sales ofElementalsbenefit the nonprofit organization Center for Humans & Nature, home to a press and farm that explore in-depth and diverse perspectives about what it means to be human in an interconnected world. Humans & Nature Press shares ideas that build community and inspire action. Humans & Nature Farm is a place where ideas take root. The Center is a place to experience human connection with nature and consider our responsibilities to the whole community of life.
About the Author :
The Elementals series coeditor, Gavin Van Horn, is Executive Editor of Humans & Nature Press Books, the author of The Way of Coyote, and the coeditor of City Creatures, Wildness, and the award-winning five-volume series Kinship. He currently resides in San Luis Obispo, California, where you can find him wandering the nearby hills and shores, learning the flowers, trying to go light.
The Elementals series coeditor, Bruce Jennings, teaches and writes on ethical and social issues in healthcare at Vanderbilt University. He is Developmental Editor for Humans & Nature Press Books. He is author of several books and many articles in the fields of bio-medical ethics, public health, and ecological ethics. Among his books is Ecological Governance: Toward a New Social Contract with the Earth (2016).
The Elementals series poetry coedtior, Nickole Brown, is the author of Sister and Fanny Says. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where she volunteers at several animal sanctuaries. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of poems about these animals, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. In 2021, Spruce Books of Penguin Random House published Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire, a book she coauthored with Jessica Jacobs, and they teach generative writing sessions together as part of their SunJune Literary Collaborative.
The Elementals poetry coeditor, Craig Santos Perez, is an indigenous Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guam. He is the author of six books of poetry and the coeditor of seven anthologies. He is Professor in the English department at the University of Hawai'i, Manoa.
Review :
“Refreshing as desert rain yet implacable as a flash flood; fragrant as loam (fine and filthy and veined by mycelia); diaphanous as breath yet just as nourishing to the body; both erotic and terrifying, like tendrils of flame licking your toes. The talking leaves in this bundle of books torque and transform language into something like food. Disparate flavors interlace and take the tongue hostage. Scrumptious.”―Dr. David Abram, cultural ecologist, geophilosopher, performance artist and author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World
“Can we humans live in kinship with the elements before they are rendered unlivable? Perhaps, if we can learn from the elements themselves what they have to teach us about right relations. How lucky we are to have the Elementals to show us a way forward. More accurately, they offer many paths to consider. These books truly are multi-faceted – a set of conversations as interconnected as their subjects. I encourage you to join in.”―Cara Benson, author of An Armsfull of Birds, an upcoming memoir about love, loss, and commitment during the climate crisis
“As nurturing as earth, as dynamic as water, as ethereal as air, as illuminating as fire, the works collected in Elementals astound in their revelations about what it means to be human in an age of profound change. This is literary environmental writing at its best.”―Amy Brady, author of Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks―a Cool History of a Hot Commodity
“Wander and linger with the poems and essays in these volumes―from tundra to desert, from soil to sky, each brings an essential voice and view to the profoundest of questions. Some will make you laugh, and others weep. Together, the words in this collection make triumphant and vital cacophony that add to their meditations on earth, air, fire and water a new element: life, and how to live it.”―Bathsheba Demuth, writer and environmental historian and author of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait
“This collection feels medicinal and miraculous all at once. The editors have gathered a constellation of some of our brightest minds, all focused on the world’s single most important topic: how can life co-flourish here on earth, with one another and with the raw stuff of the universe? This is not just ‘nature writing.’ This is cosmic writing.”―Robert Moor, bestselling author of On Trails: An Exploration
“The elements have never seemed more vital, or accessible, or just plain gorgeous. The elementals is a suite to sample and savor and ponder.”―Stephen Pyne, author of The Pyrocene
“The exceptionally diverse, fascinating, fact-filled, evocative, and awe-inspiring reflections in Elementals shatters our everyday tendency to take for granted earth, air, water, and fire, whilst illuminating how these entities and forces create and enliven the biosphere. Read and be astonished.”―Bron Taylor, author of Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future, and Editor of the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature
"Elementals is an anthem, a chorus of voices singing loud of soil and soul and how the history of the seas are the history of us, if we would listen (in the words of Rita Dove). The words on these pages create a world of “us” in relationship; breathing, present, being simply ourselves, details of landscape that tells us who we are. These stories are, in the words of Emma Gilheaney, a form of care. We are reminded of who we are in place and in love. We are reminded that there is no life without air. No breath of possibility. If only we would listen. So, inhale these stories like your life depended on it. Because these poems and essays are like a breathprint―unique, revealing and transformative. What a gift."―Carolyn Finney, Author of Black Faces/White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors, Storyteller, and Artist/Scholar-in-residence at the Franklin Environmental Center at Middlebury College
"The five volumes of Elementals comprise a sparkling library of essays, poems, stories, and meditations on the elemental realities to be encountered in the world. They offer us an experiential alchemy of the elusive elements that quietly present themselves to us, intertwine with one another, support and sustain us, alarm and amaze us―along with counsel on how to regain access to them. If you are an aspiring inhabitant of the phenomenal world, you will find unexpected riches here. Close your eyes, pick a volume, open it at random, and reacquaint yourself with elements of the world that you hadn’t recently thought to notice."―Dr. Bruce V. Foltz, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Eckerd College
