Unseasonable - by Sarah Dimick (Paperback)

About the Book

In Unseasonable, Sarah Dimick links accounts of shifting seasons across the globe, tracing how knowledge of climate change is constructed, conveyed, and amplified through literature.

Book Synopsis

Shortlisted, 2025 ASAP Book Prize, Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present

As climate change alters seasons around the globe, literature registers and responds to shifting environmental time. A writer and a fisher track the distribution of beach trash in Chennai, chronicling disruptions in seasonal winds and currents along the Bay of Bengal. An essayist in the northeastern United States observes that maple sap flows earlier now, prompting him to reflect on gender and seasons of transition. Poets affiliated with small island nations arrive in Paris for the United Nations climate summit, revamping the occasional poem to attest to intensifying storm seasons across the Pacific.

In Unseasonable, Sarah Dimick links these accounts of shifting seasons across the globe, tracing how knowledge of climate change is constructed, conveyed, and amplified via literature. She documents how the unseasonable reverberates through environmentally privileged and environmentally precarious communities. In chapters ranging from Henry David Thoreau's journals to Alexis Wright's depiction of Australia's catastrophic bushfires, from classical Tamil poetry to repeat photography, Dimick illustrates how seasonal rhythms determine what flourishes and what perishes. She contends that climate injustice is an increasingly temporal issue, unfolding not only along the axes of who and where but also in relation to when. Amid misaligned and broken rhythms, attending to the shared but disparate experience of the unseasonable can realign or sharpen solidarities within the climate crisis.

Review Quotes

An essential intervention. Dimick successfully argues that if we are to survive the Anthropocene, we must do more than just track the rising mercury; we must learn to read the breaking of the seasons.-- "H-Environment"

A quietly powerful book. Full of insights and written in a personable but authoritative voice, it asks readers to dwell in the discomfort of unfamiliar seasons and to appreciate the way art and literature allow us to grasp altered climate patterns.-- "Modern Language Quarterly"

Written with discerning insight, expansive research, and a passion...[Unseasonable] is a necessary book for environmental and ecocritical humanists interested in expanding their sense of climate change literatures beyond those produced in the Global North.-- "ISLE"

A lovely read, very accessible, and enjoyable in spite of the sadness of tone that pervades it. It is difficult not to read it as an elegy for a world lost but possible to see also the importance of global literature in all of its forms for us now. -- "British Society for Literature and Science"

Unseasonable is a bold, revelatory book--environmental humanities scholarship at its very finest. Sarah Dimick blends her humanities expertise with an attentiveness to the science of rapid climate change in a work that is global and interdisciplinary in reach. She astutely maps how climate breakdown's disturbance of seasonal norms unsettles literary and cultural forms. With rare eloquence and conceptual originality, Dimick demonstrates how climate arrhythmia is altering the baseline rhythms of aesthetic forms. Unseasonable is a profound meditation on the altered meanings--in the biophysical and aesthetic realms--of environmental time. A tour de force.--Rob Nixon, author of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

After reading Unseasonable, you cannot but see your local environments as arrhythmic and out of seasonal joint. Dimick's deft readings offer a complex vocabulary for capturing these novel "pulses" of environmental time and powerfully remind readers that literature cements seasonality in collective memory now as it has for ages. As climate crisis and literature encode new memories, we need--and Dimick provides--better accounts of the "when" of climate justice.--Heather Houser, author of Infowhelm: Environmental Art and Literature in an Age of Data

In this moving and urgent book, Sarah Dimick leads readers through a literary and phenological analysis of climate crisis. Taking the seasons as the rhythms by which we come to know our places in the world, she shows us how arrhythmias have come to disrupt what was once predictable, translatable, and reliable. Traversing the local and the global, the privileged and the vulnerable, the poetic and the pragmatic, Unseasonable names the unease of our times: confused migrations, early blooms, and coastal floods as they are translated into the collective memories we keep as environmental poem and prose.--Hiʻilei Hobart, author of Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment

Sarah Dimick's Unseasonable contributes fine-grained literary analysis and historical insight to a question pursued by the foremost scholars of the climate humanities (Mike Hulme, Kyle Powys Whyte): how climate crisis denaturalizes colonial or global notions of time. Beautiful writing, a personal and yet authoritative voice, and keen clarity mark this exceptional book.--Stephanie LeMenager, professor of English and environmental studies, University of Oregon

About the Author

Sarah Dimick is assistant professor of English at Northwestern University.