BOSTON REVIEWA POLITICAL AND LITERARY FORUM JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

The New Nature

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BOSTON REVIEWVOLUME 41, NUMBER 1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

EDITORS’ NOTE3 Deborah Chasman and Joshua Cohen

FOUNDATIONS4 Dispatch: Weaponizing Syria’s Water | Alisa Reznick

6 Made in America: Survey Says . . . | Claude S. Fischer

8 Wonders: Rethinking Evolution | Anne Fausto-Sterling

NEW DEMOCRACY FORUM10 The New Nature | Jedediah Purdy debates Jo Guldi, Jairus Grove, Robert Paarlberg, Andreas Malm, David Keith, Anna Tsing, Ugo Mattei, Vandana Shiva, Paul Waldau, and Roy Scranton

PRIVATE LIFE30 Pigs | Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey

FICTION37 The Visigoths | Olivia Clare

BOOKS & IDEAS44 Carbon on Campus | David G. Victor

48 To Be and To Do: Giorgio Agamben’s L’uso dei corpi. Homo sacer, IV, 2 | Leland de la Durantaye

54 Beyond Freedom and Equality: The Democratic Value of Dignity | Nick Bromell

ON POETRY60 Poet’s Sampler | Uyen Hua introduced by Chris Nealon

62 A Strange and Quiet Fullness: Charles Simic’s The Life of Images and The Lunatic | Robert Archambeau

65 The Volatile I: Alejandra Pizarnik’s Extracting the Stones of Madness | Johannes Göransson

68 Microreviews

ON FILM70 Blooming, Buzzing Experience: Alice Rohrwacher’s The Wonders | Alan A. Stone

POEMS34 Luminaires and 35 The City of Fremont Streets Department | John Mullen 36 What Made it Good | Allyson Paty

40 These Miles | Aaron Coleman 42 Parade | Bret Shepard 46 “The days that were have now” | Emilia Phillips

50 moon as my witness and 51 scrapers parody buddha | Amber Atiya 52 The Words, | Mark Irwin

56 want (18) and 57 want (19) | Rusty Morrison 58 Oddities | Barbara Tramonte

72 Footnoting Biggie Lyrics Like Why Christmas Missed Us | David Tomas Martinez

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COVER DESIGN: EDUARDO PALMA and RODRIGO CORRAL

Robert Archambeau teaches at Lake Forest

College. His latest book is The Kafka Sutra.

Amber Atiya, a 2012 Poets House Fellow, is

author of the chapbook the fierce bums of

doo-wop.

Nick Bromell, a founding editor of Boston

Review, is Professor of English at the University

of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author of The

Time Is Always Now.

Olivia Clare received a 2014 O. Henry Prize. She

is author of The 26-Hour Day, a book of poems.

Aaron Coleman, a semifinalist for the 92Y/

Discovery Poetry Contest, studied creative

writing at Washington University in St. Louis.

Leland de la Durantaye is Professor of Litera-

ture at Claremont McKenna College and author

of Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction.

Anne Fausto-Sterling, Nancy Duke Lewis

Professor of Biology and Gender Studies at

Brown University, is author of Sexing the Body.

Claude S. Fischer, Professor of Sociology at

University of California, Berkeley, is author of

Made in America.

Johannes Göransson co-edits Action Books

and teaches at the University of Notre Dame. His

latest volume of poetry is The Sugar Book.

Jairus Grove is Assistant Professor of Political

Science at the University of Hawai‘i Manoa.

Jo Guldi is Hans Rothfels Assistant Professor of

History at Brown University and coauthor of The

History Manifesto.

Uyen Hua is author of a/s/l (Age/Sex/Location).

Mark Irwin, a four-time recipient of the Push-

cart Prize, is author, most recently, of American

Urn: New and Selected Poems.

David Keith, Gordon McKay Professor of Applied

Physics and Professor of Public Policy at Har-

vard University, is author of A Case for Climate

Engineering.

Andreas Malm teaches human ecology at Lund

University and is author of Fossil Capital: The

Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global

Warming.

David Tomas Martinez is a CantoMundo fellow

and author of the poetry collection Hustle.

Ugo Mattei is Professor of International and

Comparative Law at University of California,

Hastings College of Law, and at the University of

Turin and coauthor of The Ecology of Law.

Rusty Morrison’s most recent book of poems

is Beyond the Chainlink.

John Mullen’s work also appears this month in

Ploughshares. He holds an MFA from Columbia

University.

Chris Nealon teaches English at Johns Hopkins

University and is author of The Matter of Capi-

tal: Poetry and Crisis in The American Century.

Robert Paarlberg, Adjunct Professor of Pub-

lic Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and

Emeritus Professor of Political Science at

Wellesley College, is author of The United States

of Excess.

Allyson Paty is author of the chapbook The

Further Away and a founding editor of Singing

Saw Press.

Emilia Phillips is author of Signaletics and the

forthcoming Groundspeed. Her work appears in

Agni, The Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares.

Jedediah Purdy, Professor of Law at Duke

University, is author of After Nature: A Politics

for the Anthropocene.

Alisa Reznick is a freelance journalist based in

Amman, Jordan.

Roy Scranton is a fellow at the Center for

Energy and Environmental Research in the

Human Sciences at Rice University and author

of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene.

Bret Shepard directs the creative writing pro-

gram at the University of Idaho and co-edits

Dikembe Press. His poems have appeared in

Colorado Review and Copper Nickel.

Vandana Shiva is author of Stolen Harvest:

The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply and

founder of Navdanya, a network of seed keepers

and organic producers.

Alan A. Stone, Touroff-Glueck Professor of Law

and Psychiatry at Harvard Law School, is author

of Movies and the Moral Adventure of Life.

Barbara Tramonte teaches in the School for

Graduate Studies at SUNY Empire State College.

Anna Tsing, Professor of Anthropology at Uni-

versity of California, Santa Cruz, is author of

The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the

Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.

Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey is a Buddhist teacher

and writer. His website is dolessforpeace.org.

David G. Victor, author of Global Warming

Gridlock, leads the Laboratory on International

Law and Regulation at UC San Diego.

Paul Waldau directs the graduate program in

Anthrozoology at Canisius College and is author

of Animal Studies: An Introduction.

CONTRIBUTORSE D I TO R S

Deborah Chasman, Joshua Cohen

M A N AG I N G E D I TO R

Adam McGee

S E N I O R E D I TO R

Simon Waxman

AS S I STA N T E D I TO R

Matt Lord

P O E T R Y E D I TO R S

Timothy Donnelly, B. K. Fischer, Stefania Heim

F I CT I O N E D I TO R

Junot Díaz

C O N T R I B U T I N G E D I TO R S

Stephen Ansolabehere, Lucie Brock-Broido, Nicholas Bromell, Stephen Burt, Helena Cobban, Owen Fiss, Neil Gordon, Jorie Graham, Matthea Harvey, Major Jackson, Glenn C. Loury, Heather McHugh, Maureen N. McLane, Evgeny Morozov, Neel Mukherjee, Marjorie Perloff, Joel Rogers, Charles Sabel, Scott Saul, Alan A. Stone

E D I TO R I A L AS S I STA N T

Hana Connelly

P O E T R Y R E A D E R S

Andy Nicole Bowers, William Brewer, Ally Covino, Julie Kantor, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Charlotte Lieberman, Nick Narbutus, Eleanor Sarasohn, Sean Zhuraw

P U B L I S H E R

Louisa Daniels Kearney

M A R K E T I N G AS S O C I AT E

Anne Boylan

D E V E L O P M E N T D I R E CTO R

Penny Betts

A DV E R T I S I N G R E P R E S E N TAT I V E

Cecilia Weddell

D I ST R I B U TO R

Disticor Magazine Distribution Services 800-668-7724, info@disticor.com

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Lane Press

B OA R D O F A DV I S O R S

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BR JANUARY / FEBRUARY 20162

Boston Review is a magazine of ideas, independent and nonprofit. We cover lots of ground—politics, poetry, film, fiction, book reviews, and criticism. But a few premises tie it all together: that democracy depends on public discussion;

that sometimes understanding means going deep; that vast inequalities are unjust; that human imagination breaks free from neat political categories; and that powerful images are worth piles of words.

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EDITORS’ NOTE

We now live in the Anthro-pocene—an era in which hu-

mans no longer stand in awe of nature but constantly reshape it. In our lead essay, Jedediah Purdy reflects on the meaning of this moment, which “adds nature to the list of things we can no longer regard as natural.” Lots of us understandably take a dim view of the Anthropocene: nei-ther climate change nor unbreathable urban air offers much to celebrate. Purdy, in contrast, sees possibilities. He thinks we should embrace the An-thropocene as an unprecedented op-portunity to shape the world—and de-mocracy—for the better. Though the precise contours of a more democratic relationship to nature are unpredict-able, Purdy finds suggestive inspira-tion in the growing food movement, with its ethical and aesthetic aware-ness of the ways food production

shapes landscapes—both physical and imaginative. We have put together a diverse group of scientists, activists, and theorists to respond to Purdy. Some respondents agree with him that pre-venting a disastrous future requires expansive acts of collective imagina-tion. Physicist David Keith echoes this sentiment in his call for a “delib-erate planet.” Others are more skepti-cal. Some think we need to roll back human intervention, not amplify it, even democratically. Others dispute the very notion that humans and na-ture can be separated: what matters, they say, is not so much how we see our relationship to nature, but how we might start to rebuild the more-than-human world. What institutions and politics must we forge? Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey’s stunning essay “Pigs” (p. 30) explores an Anthro-

pocene experiment. Two friends—both meat eaters—wanted to know whether it could feel ethical to kill animals for food. They raise and slaughter a brood of pigs in order to find “a coherent and ethical way of being in the world.” Vega-Frey is shocked to discover that “the body and the spirit, the land and the vision, the practical and the princi-pled felt inexorably pitted against each other.” Without moralizing, the essay speaks to the practical challenges we face in the Anthropocene world. In the office, we are delighted to welcome Adam McGee as our new managing editor and especially happy to do so without saying goodbye to his predecessor, Simon Waxman. Simon is now working with us as senior edi-tor and also finding some time for his own writing.

—Deborah Chasman & Joshua Cohen

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