Bookshelf

Spring 2022

FROM KNOWLEDGE TO POWER

John Perona, chemistry faculty

As wildfires and hurricanes demonstrate the impact of global warming, some people understandably despair for the planet’s future. Others continue to maintain that the science is inconclusive and the threat uncertain. Perona steers a middle course in this clear and comprehensive primer to climate advocacy, arguing that the risk is real but that concerted action can still avert catastrophic outcomes. An expert on the organisms that generate the greenhouse gas methane and an activist who has advocated limits on fossil fuels, he traces the dynamics that shape the Earth’s climate. He then outlines a number of avenues toward a zero-emissions future, both individual and societal. Thanks to the efforts of students and alumni Callie Brown MS ’21, Morgan Ramsey MS ’21, Michael Shymanski MA ’21 and Emma Wolf MA ’21 at PSU’s Ooligan Press, From Knowledge to Power arrives at a critical moment. —John Beer, Director of Creative Writing

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GODSHOT

Chelsea Bieker MFA ’12

In drought-stricken California, fourteen-year-old Lacey May discovers that the pastor who’s captivated her community has a disturbing plan to bring back the rain. Unable to rely on those around her, she sets off to find her ostracized mother. Bieker’s epic fable of girlhood and resilience, her first novel, was a finalist for the 2021 Oregon Book Awards.

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DEAD POINT

LaVonne Griffin-Valade MFA ’17

The sweeping panoramas of eastern Oregon’s John Day Valley conceal a multitude of schemes in Griffin-Valade’s debut mystery. What seems like a routine hunting violation draws the intrepid police sergeant Maggie Blackthorne into a labyrinth of deception and murder. Maggie fans can follow her subsequent adventures in Murderer’s Creek (also released in 2021) and the forthcoming Desolation Ridge.

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IMAGINE A DEATH

Janice Lee, English faculty

Lee’s exploratory novel follows a trio of characters, identified as The Writer, The Photographer, and The Old Man, as they grapple with personal grief and global environmental devastation. In winding, hypnotic sentences, Lee gives eloquent voice to her characters’ cosmic questions, as well as to the nonhuman beings with which they share the world: whales, trees, moss. Imagine a Death was a 2021 Big Other Book Award for Fiction finalist.

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FRETWORK

Michele Glazer, English faculty

In her fourth collection of poems, Glazer conjures language to bear seemingly unbearable burdens of loss and trace out alien forms of consciousness. Mourning for her parents, meditating on the lives of hagfish and sheep, she crafts spiky, arresting, and impeccably observed lines, circling around the limits of what can be seen and said.

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We feature notable alumni publications of music, fiction, nonfiction and poetry in the Bookshelf section of the magazine every issue. To be considered, send press materials and an image of the work’s cover to psumag@pdx.edu.