AustLit

'In his book The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh examines why the human imagination—especially in literary fiction—has so often failed to come to terms with what he considers the greatest crisis of our times: climate change. He calls this a failure of our collective imagination—a “great derangement”—born out of an assumption that the earth is a separate and inanimate thing on which we live, rather than a living entity of which we are a part. In a partial answer to this problem, John Kinsella’s new multigenre book, Polysituatedness, presents a view of global citizenship in prose and poetry that serves as a treatise for how humans can engage with the planet. In doing so, he suggests possibilities for fueling our imagination about the climate crisis. It is, therefore, fitting to consider these two recent books together. They share an urgency that literature, which has often been at the vanguard of addressing the challenges of our times, must do more to bring this critical issue to the center of the humanities and to human consciousness.' (Introduction)