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Other elegiac poets, other poets of ecocatastrophe, revel in sensory detail, or else pursue scrambled language for chaotic times.

In “Dirty Water,” he declares affection in ecocatastrophe terms — “I’m a natural disaster/You’re the morning after all my storms” — as the music evolves from gentle neo-psychedelic pop to full rock blare behind an environmental warning: “Bleed dirty water/breathe dirty sky.”

VanderMeer, author of the acclaimed Southern Reach Trilogy, returns with a novel set in the throes of a drawn-out ecocatastrophe.

Ecocatastrophe, wide income disparity, homelessness, inequality — all these were part of the landscape of Guthrie’s America, and today’s.

Only this year was the scope of the resulting ecocatastrophe revealed to the world.