Solastalgia - by Brittney Corrigan (Paperback)

About the Book

Solastalgia is a dazzling collection of poems about climate change, extinction, and the Anthropocene Age.

Book Synopsis

Recalling Joni Mitchell's famous lyric "They paved paradise, put up a parking lot," Solastalgia is a heart-wrenching and harrowing overview of environmental destruction. Though it is an ominous exploration of the Anthropocene era and the ways humans have contributed to the changing climate and landscape, it spends much of its time honoring all the strange and wondrous creatures-"may you outlast us"- that humans, both intentionally and unwittingly, are shoving toward extinction's cliff. Solastalgia is an eloquent tribute to all the awe-inspiring flora and fauna that we have failed as a species. I love this book not only for its incisive eco-eye but also for its dazzling language terrains. Using language as the tool to effect change, these poems make you want to be better, do better.

―Simone Muench

Review Quotes

Praise for Solastalgia

Growing up, Brittney Corrigan was, as she says, a real 'snake child' and 'horse girl, ' and though she didn't follow the path of her yearned-for careers as marine biologist or wildlife photographer, she became something just as necessary: a poet who tendrils the language of science with music, who stories the hard facts of the Anthropocene with poems that speak for the suffering lot of us-especially our nonhuman kin-as we struggle to survive this time. Here, then, is a book built from years of careful research and a loving attention to the living world. It is a book that I most need, one I will return to again and again as balm and guide, as an answer to the questions she poses in 'Elegy for One Billion Animals': 'What can we do to resurrect you? What on earth can we say?'

-Nickole Brown

These poems are a requiem for what is lost and what we're losing. They are also a rallying cry, refusing to erase the efforts of the many cries for climate justice ringing around the world.

-Camille Dungy

With the music of prayer and the precision of science, Brittney Corrigan has compiled a dazzling bestiary of the endangered and the everyday, from the backyard to the fossil record. Celebratory and mournful, audacious and tender, these astonishing poems offer a bold reassessment of what it means to be human in a time of climate crisis and mass extinction, a time when birdsong has become 'no longer a chorus but a lonely, / indicating trill.' Clear-eyed about what comes next, about what won't survive us and what will, Solastalgia nevertheless offers a stirring invitation to wonder, to hope, 'to create / something beautiful from / the dissolution we have made.' In an age of sweeping change and profound loss, Corrigan's expansive vision helps me imagine a way forward, a way to understand 'how / the weight of loss can be beautiful / in its opening.'

-Brian Simoneau

How can poetry speak to this moment of ecological unraveling and grief? Brittney Corrigan's collection, Solastalgia, is a brave and beautiful response to this call. In poems that sing with incantatory spells of direct address, Corrigan won't turn away from our burning world or from the miraculous embodiment of specific creatures we have lost or stand at the precipice of losing. With imagery grounded in science and soaring in imagination, these poems evoke the creatures they speak to, enacting their pulsating forms, their wrinkled snouts, fluttering wings, tufted ears, and whip-noted voices. This book is an "Anthropocene blessing" to all of us who yearn for ways to praise and pray and mourn in this teetering time.

-Anne Haven McDonnell