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Its monumental rocks, etched by glaciers during the last Ice Age, have made Yosemite National Park a crown jewel of the national park system and a world-celebrated destination. Yet, more and more, fire rather than ice is shaping this storied landscape.

In the last decade, fire has blasted into public attention. California’s blazes have captured national and global media interest with their drama and urgency. Expand the realm of fire to include the burning of fossil fuels, and the fire story also subsumes climate change. Renowned fire historian Stephen J. Pyne argues that the relationship between fire and humans has become a defining feature of our epoch, and he reveals how Yosemite offers a cameo of how we have replaced an ice age with a fire age: the Pyrocene.

Organized around a backcountry trek to a 50-year experiment in restoring fire, Pyrocene Park describes the 150-year history of fire suppression and management that has led us, in part, to where the park is today. But there is more. Yosemite’s fire story is America’s, and the Earth’s, as it shifts from an ice-informed world to a fire-informed one. Pyrocene Park distills that epic story into a sharp miniature.

Flush with people, ideas, fires, and controversy, Pyrocene Park is a compelling and accessible window into the American fire scene and the future it promises.
 

José Felipe Alvergue examines anger in American poetry, while reflecting on the permissible/policed cultural affects of our time. By way of BIPOC and QTPOC poets engaging with negativity—frustration, anger, distress—Alvergue argues that affects that reflect a counternarrative to benevolence challenge the colonial underpinnings of “American publics” as a concept of democratic participation and practice of community. Purple politics play out daily within spaces we rely on for shared comfort and belonging, namely neighborhoods, dinner tables, school board meetings, and social media. Purplish America describes the uncertain terrain of potential violence, potential conflict, distrust, and post-factualism upon which language and soma are still expected to thrive.
        purplish challenges the idea of an objective or unbiased cultural rationale to purple regions in America by historicizing how anger has been systemically cleansed from the collective sentiments regarding nation-building throughout key moments of our national heritage.