He went into libraries and archives to study photographs and contemporary accounts of the Allied bombing campaigns from the perspective of Germans on the ground. So, slow violence isn’t a subject that’s tackled across scales in many novels (poetry, I think, especially American poetry now, has more room for it).

Hildyard’s writing is a feast for the senses: vivid and beguiling, pragmatic and unflinching, and deeply thoughtful. Her style is more reminiscent of such contemporary poets as Kathleen Jamie and Alice Oswald, with their quiet and attentive watchfulness to a non-human reality they only half-understand. I take this to mean that attunement with nonhuman silences and spaces is a way of placing oneself relationally. DH: People have different feelings about language, but I get a sense that many of us, perhaps especially those who are invested in environmental or ecological relationships, dislike and mistrust it at the moment.Zuckerman helped to standardize a kill rate for different types of bombs that indicated casualties per area. He compares the German literature to a personal diary kept by a doctor in Hiroshima, Japan, during the same period. Even as he was writing, at the end of the twentieth century, there was no answer to the question of how to confront the suffering of Nazi citizens—of whether to confront their suffering at all. Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, a study of the historical legacies of the transatlantic slave trade, refers in passing to marine scientists’ studies of whale fall.

He includes a grainy photograph of charred black forms on cobblestones, and he also mentions that the lilac and chestnut trees had a second flowering in the spring of 1943. After they left, the footage showed spider crabs and rock crabs creeping out over the corpse, which had, in the still water, taken on a strangely woolly appearance. And I had this sense of life pouring or rushing, with many different beings colliding with one another, stories converging and diverging. But despite my admiration for the chains of renewing energy, a part of me didn’t want to watch the whale’s majestic body being parceled out in units the size of a worm’s bite.

The images were beautifully clear, most of the species familiar to me, but I had a heightened awareness that what I was watching contained something that I couldn’t see. They do this by looking at all different kinds of things that you wouldn’t necessarily expect, like the ways the trees had snapped in the square outside, the way bombs leave marks on the snow. There is something dissociative about a description of war as chains of interactions between beings and forces, rather than as the exclusively human story of nations and disagreements. Sharpe begins with the physical events of the transverse waves at a slave ship’s stern, but from there she finds Hurricane Katrina, medical inequalities, the twenty-first-century carceral system, police brutality, and everyday racism being drawn into the outspreading waves of the wake.