Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter 1
2. Contents 7
3. Introduction: Multispecies Chronotopes— Keywords for Thinking Creatively Beyond the Human 11
4. Vegetal Life and Plant Poetics
5. Cleveland Select 33
6. Blood on the Kitchen Table 43
7. Flowers 53
8. Arboreal Encounters in Richard Powers’s The Overstory 65
9. Photo Series #1
10. The Lives of Trees 91
11. Sonic Bugs and Lyrical Beasts
12. Skunk 107
13. “The Citizenry of All Things Within One World”: Mary Oliver’s Poetic Explorations of Kinship 109
14. Strange Animals in Stylish Habitats: Marianne Moore’s Poetry Revisited 123
15. The Beetles—Greatest Hits: The Rhythm ’n’ Sound of Insects 141
16. Robert Lowell’s Hidden Cats: From Lord Weary’s Castle to Dolphin 151
17. Zoological Encounters 161
18. Photo Series #2
19. Urban Animals 163
20. Political Ecologies in a Multispecies World
21. Notes on Thoreau’s Posthuman Democracy 181
22. Sacred Pact or Overkill? Human-Bison Relations in North American Mythologies 195
23. Hands: Transdifferent Encounters between Human and Nonhuman Animals 211
24. Immanence is Bliss: The Ecological Imagination in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow 225
25. The Decline of Humanity in a Post-Animal World: The Animal Motif in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road 241
26. Art Work
27. Uninvited Collaborations with Nature 255
28. With and Beyond Nonhumans: Encounters, Empathy, Entanglements
29. “Strange Matings” and Cultural Encounters: Octavia Butler’s Fiction as “Companion Species” to Theory 263
30. More Than Human? Dracula’s Monstrosity 277
31. “Revealing the Wellsprings of Power”: An Essay on the Social Function of Humor in “The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story” 291
32. Empathy with the Animal 303
33. Martin Usborne’s Dogs: On Entangled Empathy in The Silence of Dogs in Cars and Where Hunting Dogs Rest 311
34. Paws of Courage: The Heroization of Dogs in Contemporary American Culture 321
35. Acknowledgements 335
36. Biographical Notes 337