New vocabulary for a world on the brink The Anthropocene is a term proposed for the present geological epoch (from the time of the Industrial Revolution onwards) to highlight the role of humanity in the transformation of earth's environment globally, has become the subject of scholarship not only in the sciences, but also in the arts and humanities as well. Ecopoetics, a multidisciplinary approach that includes thinking and writing on poetics, science, and theory as well as emphasizing innovative approaches common to conceptual poetry, rose out of the late 20th-century awareness of ecology and concerns of environmental disaster. Collected from contributors including Brenda Hillman, Eileen Tabios, and Christopher Cokinos, and together a monument to human responsiveness and invention, Counter-Desecration is a book of ecopoetics that compiles terms—borrowed, invented, recast—that help configure or elaborate human engagement with place. There are no analogous volumes in the field of ecocriticism and ecopoetics. The individual entries, each a sketch or a notion, through some ecopoetic lens—anti-colonialism, bioregionalism, ecological (im)balance, indigeneity, resource extraction, extinction, habitat loss, environmental justice, queerness, attentiveness, sustainability—focus and configure the emerging relations and effects of the Anthropocene. Each entry is a work of art concerned with contemporary poetics and environmental justice backed with sound observation and scholarship.

Two sociologists infiltrate a cult that pulls them into madness in this “barbed and richly entertaining” novel from a Pulitzer Prize–winning author (The Wall Street Journal). Once the nation’s most popular sociologist, Tom McMann searches for a research subject that will invigorate his career. Unlike any study he’s seen before, he targets the Truth Seekers, an up-and-coming cult that seeks flying saucers, utopian planets, and new spiritual plains. An irresistible mixture of New Age cranks and sci-fi nerds, they are ruled over by Verena, a beautiful young telepath who believes she has a hotline to another world. The Seekers are isolated, committed, and eccentric, but most importantly, they’re hiring. Assisted by his wide-eyed young colleague, Roger Zimmern, McMann infiltrates the Truth Seekers, hoping to see how the zealots respond if questioned by someone within their midst. But when Verena’s babblings start to make a little too much sense, the researchers must choose between losing their minds and buying one-way tickets to outer space. From the National Book Award–shortlisted author of Foreign Affairs, The War Between the Tates, and The Last Resort, this is a richly funny novel that will dazzle and entertain. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Alison Lurie including rare images from the author’s collection.

Poetry. HOW TO KNOW THE FLOWERS by Jessica Smith is a poetry collection about processes: The process of naturally dyeing flowers, the process of dealing with trauma, the process of remembering. In her poems, Smith examines sexual harassment, female friendship, and grief, accepting the gaps and fragments that unavoidably occur while doing such work.

Poetry. "These poetic constellations are places to inhabit and shifting possibilities for meaning. Jessica Smith rounds every corner with another corner. ORGANIC FURNITURE CELLAR is the future in a now"--Charles Bernstein. "Jessica Smith's ORGANIC FURNITURE CELLAR takes on big issues, such as how to write about the place where you live with all its distractions, beauties, and limitations intact. And she writes out of these questions a beautifully fragmented series of page aware poems. A stunning and necessary first book"--Juliana Spahr. Jessica Smith refuses to write like lyric poets, who merely rearrange the furniture of language in their rooms; instead, she makes her language skid 'every which way' like an office chair kicked across a parquet floor"--Christian Bok.