More City Than Water: A Houston Flood Atlas

Memoirist Johnson (The Reckonings) and graphic arts professor Beckett pull together 22 pieces about climate change’s effect on Houston in this strong anthology. As Johnson writes in her introduction, “An ideal map of the city should include... history and all its implications: articulated and silent, evident and hidden,” and, as such, each entry is paired with a cartographic image to create an atlas of “our relationship to the land, to the future, to flooding, and to one another.” A map of hazardous liquid pipelines accompanies Sonia Hamer’s “Gusher,” in which she explores the early days of Houston’s oil industry after oil was found in 1916 in Goose Creek, while a map of Independence Heights, “the first Black municipality in Texas,” comes with Aimee Vonbokel, Tanya Debose, and Alexandria Parson’s “History Displaced,” which looks at how the city’s flooding is “a problem with social, political, and racial dimensions.” Sonia Del Hierro’s poem “Harvey Alerts,” meanwhile, recounts email alerts she received during the 2017 hurricane and is illustrated with a map of locations the alerts pertain to. Despite the narrow focus, the variety of voices and formats gives the work a sense of breadth. It adds up to a tough, thought-provoking depiction of the wreckage wrought by a changing climate. (May)