Immemorial

Essayist Markham (A Map of Future Ruins) delivers a probing meditation on grief, memory, and memorialization. She recounts how viewing Greenland’s melting icecaps while on a transatlantic flight got her thinking about how a memorial could capture her grief over a “vanishing future” in which humanity dodges the worst of climate change. This kicks off a winding exploration of how memory and mourning intersect in various memorials, as when Markham discusses how Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., heralded the arrival of an abstract architectural style that creates meaning through visitors’ interactions with the space. “Memorials are bound up in problems of power,” Markham contends, suggesting that the late-19th-century Confederate monuments she saw while on a trip to Montgomery, Ala., didn’t aim to preserve the past so much as assert a white supremacist future. Other memorials mourn what hasn’t yet been lost, she writes, describing how a proposed redesign of D.C.’s waterfront East Potomac Park would mark the advance of climate change by planting cherry trees on a graded slope so that as sea levels rise, rows of trees progressively drown. Despite the elegiac tone and often bleak subject matter, Markham finds hope amid the darkness, encouraging readers to “let our grief become fuel” for climate activism. Plaintive and powerful, this is hard to forget. Agent: Julia Kardon, HG Literary. (Feb.)