November 2017. New Brunswick, Canada. Having spent five hours banding lobster claws, Karissa Lindstrand detects an anomaly on one of the crustaceans. Inscribed on its left pincer is a familiar yet resolutely inorganic swirl of red, blue, and white. A corporate sigil branded onto the exoskeletal form of aquatic life: the Pepsi globe. While marine biologists disagree about the conditions under which the lobster acquired its tattoo – one suggestion is that the creature grew into a discarded can, another is that a cardboard box adhered to its propodite limb – the specific cause is less significant than what the marking represents on a world-historical scale. From this position, the lobster's deformation can be seen as an embodiment of the metabolic rift between global capitalism and nonhuman nature, presenting itself here as a grotesque reminder that human society exists within an earthly metabolism and that our hegemonic social arrangement – engineering profit through the mass production of commodities – is disrupting an equilibrium required for the sustenance of life on this planet. We encounter that rift in more ways than one: in the lobster's biological fusion with the refuse of one commodity, a melding together of two radically dissimilar sets of armor, but also in the fact that the moment the lobster is dredged from the ocean it is transformed, by the human labor of fishing, from a natural resource into a sellable form. “It is probably in Boston,” Lindstrand speculated on the lobster's passage through the market to its ultimate destiny as luxury comestible.Footnote ¹ The idea that capitalism is averse to the ecological matrix within which all life adheres, opening up a rift between a humanly engineered economy and its nonhuman biosphere, is not new. It originated in the nineteenth century, when Karl Marx theorized that capitalist production inaugurates “an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.”Footnote ² And yet that rift has widened and deepened through the ecohistorical period beginning around 1945, during what is often described as the Great Acceleration, an economically conditioned phase of planetary time when anthropogenic activity presaged environmental transformation on an unprecedented scale. Toxic sludge, oil spills, nuclear winter, extinction events wrought in flood and fire: such are the forms of our metabolic rift, in the context of whose proliferation “climate change” reads as the most inadequate of all euphemisms. That is what we are given to behold, as a kind of biomorphic prosopopoeia, in the lobster's claw.

Margaret Ronda's first book of literary criticism, Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End, engages all of these concerns from the standpoint of poetry and poetics. Published in 2018, its introduction contains a near-inversion of the corporate-branded lobster, taken from working-class Wisconsin poet Lorine Niedecker:

In this poem we encounter the half-lives of both nature and the commodity as each endures beyond its own obsolescence and into the alien space of the other. “The obdurate presence of the beer can,” Ronda suggests, “conjures the uncanny animacy of the commodity persisting beyond the productive circuits of capital; the evanescent feathers dot the can in an eerie simulation of the duck's living being,” presenting us with a disjunctive, well-nigh surreal figure that, as metonymy for ecological degradation, “highlights matter not just out of place but out of time, lingering beyond the organic life cycle of the bird and the commodity cycle of the beer – a living on into decay that becomes a temporal hallmark of postwar poetic representations of remainders” (7). This, a temporal contretemps or anachronism, is one of three senses in which the book means “remainder,” the term Ronda uses to specify the simultaneously political and aesthetic mediations of accelerating planetary destruction under late capitalism: “untimely forms, marginal to the rhythms of capitalist production but also unmoored from biospheric cycles associated with the Holocene” (9). Beyond this sense of remaining is the idea that nature itself, a signifier of nonhuman otherness and of creative renewal, has become “a remaindered category of poetic thinking,” a pastorally inflected trope or even worldview that no longer has a coherent object within our historical moment. Romantic notions of an ideal universe comprising interconnected forms of organic perfection, a green plenty set out before humans, effloresced in the ecological thinking of Emerson and Whitman through Frost and Moore; this crypto-Thoreauvian cohesion, however, “no longer obtains in a time of accelerating ecological crisis,” and so historically aware poetry and its readers are now forced to “consider what happens when the figurative potential for natural renewal of refuge becomes no longer possible” (11). What ecological transformation requires, for Ronda, is a shift away from any sort of humanist “green reading” to a more forceful engagement with and argument against the remediation of every living thing through its exchange value. Here, then, is the book's politics: by showing in concrete terms that neoliberal economic rationality is catastrophically hostile to collective human and nonhuman survival, to any sort of biospheric or ecological subsistence, this book develops a powerful argument that our planet and its inhabitants are thoroughly incompatible with capitalism.

All of this brings us to a third category of remainder, which critically mediates between the economic and the ecological: poetry. Conjuring an image of “the remainders table in a bookstore,” Ronda's introduction includes a careful and necessary framing argument about literary and poetic value under capitalism and in relation to environmental crises. The book's central aesthetic claim is that the cultural enterprise of poetry, unlike prose narrative, is itself remaindered, anachronistic to the present historical conjuncture. Poems, for Ronda, “might be understood as residual cultural forms, still an active presence in and of the present but with no claim to dominance in the cultural sphere,” thereby manifesting at the level of form no less than thematic content “an attunement to recursivity and belatedness,” a preternatural sense that poetry and poetic objects are, here and now, out of time (17–18). It is on this point that Ronda draws on the theoretical legacy of the Frankfurt school, with an emphasis on Benjamin and Adorno, to propose a poetic alternative to nature as humanist ideal. “Natural history,” she argues, “rejects triumphal progress-narratives of historical development and cumulative meaning in favor of a governing logic of disintegration, loss, and untimeliness,” thereby eroding the distinctions between historical being and natural being, to instead posit a dialectical form that shows us “nature overwritten by history, history suffused by decay” (12). If poetry – because of its persistence as cultural residue as much as its non-narrative modes, weird temporalities, and rhetorical scale-jumps – is the genre proper to natural history during the time of accelerated crises, then remainder is the form that genre takes when confronted with its historical context. “Unlike the monumental figure of the ruin or the elliptical shard of the fragment,” Ronda draws a line between her work and that of Benjamin and Adorno, “the remainder, as considered in these poems, evokes the ongoing and intensifying processes that characterize natural-historical entanglements in this period,” to generate dialectical images that fuse nature and history “not to renaturalize the production of nature under capitalism but to provide a causal account of matter-in-time and thus to expose the historicity, the social kernel, of its composition and decay” (13). The major achievement of the book, then, is to show that this is precisely what poetry has been doing since around 1945, and that it has been doing so via its own formal games and aesthetic contingencies and with one eye turned to the changing, or devolving, sense of nature on a global scale.

While the critique of environmental destruction has in recent years become increasingly materialist, with thinkers like Jason W. Moore and Andreas Malm correcting ecohistorical periodization by shifting emphasis away from the human and onto capitalism, unique to Ronda's book – which shares those thinkers’ suspicion of the Anthropocene as uncritically humanist – is its meticulous and forceful literary readings. By combining an acute sensitivity to local detail with a macroscopic understanding of history, the book's chapters tell a story that conveys the ecological consequences of global economic development more compellingly than any other work of literary criticism available today. If there is any suspicion that the materialist strand of ecocriticism only reads literature thematically, reducing it to the status of documentary evidence to support theoretical and historical arguments, Ronda conjures that misapprehension into oblivion, demonstrating concretely that while nature is in part the invention of literature, literature is the discursive regime that has been critically thinking its destruction. Ronda's tour of postwar American poetry maps the literary onto economic history, focussing on the mid-century boom years; on the dovetailing of political and ecological crises in the 1960s and 1970s; and on the contemporary historical moment, after the United States’ withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol. The treatment of these moments and their poetry across five substantive chapters presents the totalizing view of a social system wherein ecological catastrophe is never universal and abstract but always articulated through the lifeworld hierarchies of class, race, and gender. This is clearest in the first chapter, which compares the poetry of Lorine Niedecker with that of Gwendolyn Brooks, asking how socioecological transformation is experienced during the “Golden Age of American Capitalism,” not by focussing – like so much other criticism about the mid-century period – on the predominantly white, middle-class suburbs, but instead on the rural and urban peripheries. By looking to rural Wisconsin and urban Chicago through these two poets, we are reminded not just of environmental catastrophe but also of that catastrophe's manifest inequity. We are shown firsthand “an emergent history of racism and impoverishment as environmental conditions” (18), with its most devastatingly vivid articulation in Brooks's long poem, “the children of the poor,” which indexes good health and its obverse, child mortality, to living conditions that have been defined by class and race as caught between the ecological dynamics of underdevelopment and gentrification.

Chapter 2, on John Ashbery, takes place in New York during the late 1960s through the early 1970s, when Ashbery's atmospheric poetry attuned itself to the emergence of modern environmental movements and a dawning consciousness of systemic ecological crisis. Like Rachel Carson and Barry Commoner, Ronda argues, Ashbery's poetic is reactive to atmospheric transformation, which it registers affectively and ambiently as a somatic perception or collective mood, whilst simultaneously obviating the language of environmentalism, which at this time had “already been co-opted to advocate for capitalist development” (51). Instead of anything like corporate environmentalism or eco-branding, Ashbery's poems apprehend air itself as the uncanny medium for an immanent but no less material sign of ecological degradation, a form that “bears more than simply a seasonal shift or impending storm, while resisting any explanatory causal account,” thereby conveying a sense of crisis without didactic knowledge. “To trace these appearances, not quite topical but more than incidental,” Ronda tells us, “is to bring to the fore what often remains recessive,” which generates the question, “How does one account for presences in poems that emerge as pressures, felt densities, something noticed but also overlooked?” (44). Looking at contemporaneous but radically different poetry, the subsequent chapter is dedicated to what Ronda describes as the “revolutionary pastoral,” a contradictory genre that tries to “imagine an ecological commons grounded in nonmodern or ‘primitive’ ways of living but also figured as requiring profound social change in order to come into being,” less an expression of romantic anticapitalism than the wholesale attempt to apprehend social and ecological realities by suspending the reality principle. Some anarchists would call this future primitivism (67). “This imagined outside is not,” Ronda argues, “a sign of political incoherence or irrational fervor but a sustained thought experiment in imagining an ecologically oriented commons not determined by present values and political frameworks” (69). Whereas Ashbery was sensing a future catastrophe, the poets of the revolutionary pastoral – namely Gary Snyder and Diane di Prima – project an ecological commons to come, a postcapitalist biosphere only attainable through revolutionary action. Di Prima is especially emphatic on this latter point, which articulates through a political hostility that extends beyond the usual suspects of environmental critique to interrogate liberal complicity. “The enemy,” in Ronda's account of di Prima's politics, “is not only powerful leaders of corporations and nation-states together with modern scientists, engineers, and designers; it is the well-meaning liberal who enjoys her modern conveniences and who thinks that various forms of progress are the key to larger social well-being” (78). This is why, as a mode or genre, the revolutionary pastoral rejects any sort of reformist or technocratic solution to a crisis that is absolute and abetted, as opposed to inhibited, by narcissistic rock concerts and virtue-signalling gestural politics.

The final two chapters bring this book very close to the present moment. Chapter 4 is about nature's end, “a means of describing the cumulative, and still accumulating, environmental impact of capitalist development in the present” (94), an idea that is dated to 1989: the year in which Bill McKibben theorized that human activity would from then on determine all ecological life, but also the year in which Francis Fukuyama pronounced the end of history in capitalism's achievement of unchallenged global hegemony. This chapter centers its analysis on Juliana Spahr's 2005 poem “Gentle Now, Don't Add to Heartache,” which is read as exemplary of the “eco-elegy,” a poetic way of thinking negatively, of conjuring absence and reckoning with the material superannuation of nature as a site of renewal. Ronda, however, delineates between Spahr's elegiac presentation and traditional sentimentalism about humankind's estrangement from the natural. “By the poem's end,” Ronda argues, “the speaker takes responsibility for not taking responsibility, grieves for not grieving – and it is through these acknowledgments that its subject comes to be,” a retrospective persona shaped by guilt-ridden grief (96). In other words, this is not the Wordsworthian lament of a historical process witnessed in real time; it is, rather, clear-eyed acknowledgment of the way things have already and irrevocably gone. The chapter concludes by leaping to Spahr's more recent poetic output, with its focus on systemic capitalist crisis, which draws attention to the political limits of the earlier eco-elegiac perspective and turns toward more insurrectionary moods or feelings, “replacing its dynamics of eros with a new emphasis on aggression,” as is witnessed in Spahr's 2014 collaboration with Joshua Clover, “#Misanthropocene 24 Theses,” a poem that demands open warfare against capitalism as the only way out of the present crisis (108). While this poem is reminiscent of di Prima, it articulates its politics without recourse to the pastoral as a utopian counterpoint or source of comfort, and instead finds social and ecological good in the act of insurrection. “This is how the misanthropocene ends,” reads one of its theses. “We go to war against it. My friends go to war against it. They run howling with joy and terror against it. I go with them” (111). Continuing the line of irreversible fallenness, chapter 5 accounts for the emergence of “ecopoetics,” an institutionalized formation concerned with anthropogenic impact on the nonhuman world, and its coincidence with the United States’ withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, which aimed to regulate industrial carbon emissions. The poetry of this moment, Ronda shows, mobilizes lyric techniques of address and voicing to explore individual and collective participation in ecological damage, enacting a symbolic process of “naming and addressing” (128) as a way of coming to terms with what has become irreparable. While this chapter turns on questions of accountability and responsibility, there is a demystifying geopolitical undercurrent to its formulations, attached to the relationship between China as the world's highest carbon-emitting nation and foreign investment from the United States, on behalf of whose companies Chinese industry undertakes large-scale production. And, while this chapter is also interested in human agency, it emphatically hedges against universalisms; “my use of the term ‘anthropogenic,’” Ronda clarifies, “reflects not a poetics of species universalism per se. Instead, it points to the ways these poems draw on tropes of humanness, subjectification, and de-facing as they examine particular, situated subject positions in a historical moment” (115), a moment when accelerated destruction has become irreversible actuality, and when some are more culpable or more affected than others.

And yet, by summarizing a study of poetry and poetics into a historical narrative about literature and capitalism, this review fails to convey what is unique to the book and perhaps more difficult to export from its pages: namely Ronda's signal strength as a virtuosic reader of poetry, and her skill at showing how the granular substance of poetic language is suffused with affective potential and how it opens up to more speculative thought. We see this in every chapter, in just about every reading, but perhaps most compellingly when Ronda thinks on grammar. As she reads a line by Snyder, “The key word here, of course, is ‘could’ – a word that captures imaginative openness, a quality of surmise, and an orientation toward the untried rather than actual” (72). Or, later, on Spahr: “The poem's beginning in a timeless present tense where ‘heartaches’ seems not yet to exist – a present tense suffused with the poignant aura of an impossible wish – lays out the negative work of the poem” (98). In readings like these, which abound throughout the book, poetry is revealed as a way of thinking social and ecological alternatives, of imagining an ecological commons from the position of our late-capitalist wastescape, and of what it might take to bring that commons into being. The book's coda, “On Storms to Come,” occupies this mode of thinking and at times approaches the catalytic form of a manifesto. “In their portraits of the sustained degradation and loss of this common planetary inheritance,” the book's poetic content is summarized, “such cultural works powerfully remind us what is worth struggling for” (133). This coda, like the preceding chapters, avoids anything like optimism to instead advocate for a reckoning with what has been lost and what persists, and for whom such loss and persistence have come to define life itself: “such a politics,” we are reminded once more, “also insists on the violent unevenness of its effects across these regions and for their respective populations” (133). While this review is going to resist temptation and not quote from the book's final paragraph with its well-earned call to arms, it will be worth recalling an earlier chapter in which Ronda, thinking about the revolutionary pastoral's codification as utopian impossibility, suggests that countercultural writing from the 1970s now serves as “a dispiriting reminder of how utterly bewildering this radical register has been for many of its readers” (88). The poems of di Prima and Snyder, she suggests, appear to “a contemporary audience as anachronistic emblems of a now-faded radical era,” which in itself is the symptom of “a turning away from imaginative engagement with the possibility of an ecological politics conducted in the idiom of revolutionary antagonism and collective struggle after the 1970s,” the remaindered afterlife of political commitment (88). The work of Ronda's book is to restore that imaginative and revolutionary possibility, nurturing its affective germ from within the space of poetry, and that is the source of this book's real value, a reinvention of the radical register of thought and action for our historical present – because nothing less will be sufficient if we are to survive the storms to come.