Emergency: Daisy Hildyard

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The ecology of anthropogenic disaster, as we see it here, is the story of extermination as both systematic and uncontrollable. He recently published, together with Sven Vitse, Affectieve crisis, literair herstel: De romans van de millenialgeneratie (2021; Amsterdam University Press) [Affective Crisis, Literary Repair: The Novels of the Millennials], a study of twenty-first-century literature from the perspective of an affective crisis. They do this by looking at all different kinds of things that you wouldn’t necessarily expect, like the ways the trees had snapped in the square outside, the way bombs leave marks on the snow. I could see him intimately now – his features were precise and miniature: acorn-cup ears, thread-fine whiskers radiating in all directions, and tiny hand-shaped feet.

Time lapsed, and then the footage showed the last edible scraps of whale flesh, covered with and surrounded by tiny mites and grains, all feeding. So, slow violence isn’t a subject that’s tackled across scales in many novels (poetry, I think, especially American poetry now, has more room for it). Past and present, nature and humanity, life and death intermix, ebbing and flowing in a stream of prose that carries the reader on an exhilarating and frequently provocative and violent ride.One spring evening, when I was old enough to be outside and alone, I was sitting above the quarry on the edge of the village when I saw a panel of clay drop away from the facing vertical side and fall into a pool of water.

I sat outside the hutch and waited for them to be revealed when their mother rolled aside – tiny pink squirming things which were in the process of becoming, from day to day, delicate versions of their parents.Certainly, there was a vitality to these queer, psychedelic beings and their inventive methods for making new life. It is told by Lyudmila, who had, at the time of the explosion, recently married Vasily, “Vasya,” a firefighter. Its prose is bewitching and uncompromising, alive to the enmeshing of cruelty with care that articulates our shared – human and nonhuman – existence.

There is something dissociative about a description of war as chains of interactions between beings and forces, rather than as the exclusively human story of nations and disagreements. I think that making an attempt to respond to these questions with honesty now does involve making some big changes to this story of human nature – an upheaval is happening. When I first read Sharpe’s history of systematic cruelty told as a story of particles and mineral traces, it seemed like an ecological narrative of a kind I hadn’t read before, and I thought of the title of a nonfiction book by the German novelist W.The most striking change on the ground was observed in the populations of parasitic creatures who thrive on unburied bodies: “‘Rats and flies’ … the multiplication of species that are usually suppressed in every possible way. His autobiography states that he was witness to a “devastation … greater than anything I had ever seen.