By Anna Farro Henderson

Facing environmental crises, Kathryn Nuernberger obsesses over mutually beneficial interspecies relationships in Held: Essays in Belonging (Sarabande Books, 2025). Short lyrical essays named for pairs of species examine our interconnectedness and collective experiences. Yucca moths fertilize and feed on the Yucca plant. Mycorrhiza fungi live on trees and share resources among them to maintain forest health. Bioluminescent algae camouflage bobtail squid in moonbeams, hiding them from predators. “I need sparrows to understand myself,” Nuernberger writes. Non-human species offer mirrors to see ourselves and imagine how else we might show up in relationships. Through essays on
travel, observation, and grief, Nuernberger attempts to find belonging in the poetics of ecology and to share this belonging with all of us.

Essays are linked by Nuernberger’s narrative of an unbearable loss. A few years ago, while Nuernberger was watching a group of children, one child drowned. As a mother raising her own young child, Nuernberger returns, again and again, to the scene of a child from her community drowning and her inability to save them. As she moves between this personal tragedy and wider environmental concerns, the line blurs between an individual apocalypse and the fate of the planet.

Held is structured as what Jane Alison described as an “explosion” in Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative. Throughout the book, a hot core of tragedy, fear, and destruction radiates outward. Nuernberger cannot make sense of the child’s death or her own guilt. She tries to outrun grief and fear. Essays grab at, chase, and fling out scientific facts with a sense of urgent but futile inquiry. “I’m not sure what the right question is, so I ask about the tree instead,” she writes. The self seems to recede as the consequences of species extinction, wildfire, and genocide loom. Time gets stuck or has to be held all at once. “I’m so afraid my child won’t be able to love this life. I am afraid of this for all of us,” she writes in the essay “Everything Is Going to Be Alright.” The reader knows the end of the book at the start, propelled forward by the need to make something whole from the broken fragments.

Like a scientist, Nuernberger catalogues the Latin names for plants and animals. But as a poet, her inquiry is one of language. She indexes words we need but don’t yet have to make sense of our rapidly changing world. One needed word is for the fear of having heard the last birdsong of your life. Another is a word to describe the “gasping beauty” of green algae in the stream of a melting glacier. Like a scientist, Nuernberger goes on field expeditions. But her research is an attempt to “create a path between my life and that of an aeroplankton,” she writes in my favorite essay, “The Complex Biological Entity Known as Sky.” In another essay she imagines what it feels like to be a lichen made up of two species laced into one—algae and fungi. And, in another, that the song of a grasshopper comes from her own chest.

The willingness and need to dissolve the self represent both an approaching and a turning away from. In the essay, “Lecture Notes on Literature and Empathy,” Nuernberger walks out on her university colleagues’ debate over whether the concept of empathy is a racist construct, an ego-protecting delusion, or part of their core mission. She is more interested in her own question: “What is this feeling I get when I walk through a field of swaying grasses?”

“I want to believe it is possible to understand each other,” Nuernberger writes in an essay on the symbiotic relationship between ants and acacia. However, mutually beneficial intimacy can fall apart—in this case, the ants and trees attack each other in the absence of the elephants and giraffes, which the ants once protected the trees from. Nuernberger confesses to having felt harshly toward parasites, which stand in as a metaphor for those who have harmed her, or for herself when she has caused harm to others. “I also read about parasites, who haven’t figured out yet what they can offer in return.” Evolution shows that exploitative relationships can evolve into symbiotic mutualism, but it takes time. Eons, even.

Given the rapid changes in our environment and our technology, we need to find new ways of being, less exploitative ways, perhaps even mutually beneficial ways. And we don’t have eons. While the traditional environmental movement has often cast nature as separate from humans, Nuernberger’s pilgrimage to see, ask, and learn from place and other species provides another approach. At a time when we seek community and clarity, Held offers a map to integrate ourselves and our stories as part of an alive and layered world.

Anticipating society’s eventual collapse, Nuernberger looks for hope in species who live in the aftermath of disaster, wreckage, and wastelands. On the slopes of Kilauea silent crickets, ‘ōhi‘a lehua trees, and ferns live on recently erupted lava. They transform rock to dirt, opening the land for others. Nuernberger and her husband make love in their rental car on the volcano. They had fallen in love amongst ruins in their home state of Missouri, and on early dates, they’d hiked to cabins with collapsed roofs the Forest Service would eventually burn down. In the essay, “The Barrens,” Nuernberger explores the abundance of seemingly empty places like these. European settlers failed to see wonder in the carnivorous pitcher plants or sundews of the wetlands they had cleared to cultivate and build upon. Those drained lands had once acted as the kidneys of our watersheds, buffering pollution and floods. The environmental degradation of modern society is not just a concern for the altruistic. The harm is to ourselves.

As in her earlier work, particularly Rue (2020), Nuernberger continues to capture and challenge readers with her meditations on nature, relationships, and loss. In Held she seeks out the strange communions among species and individuals. She imagines a world where beauty might be enough and belonging might just come from seeing that others are as alive as ourselves, whether the other is a human, another species, or a landscape—teeming and strange.

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Anna Farro Henderson’s Core Samples: A Climate Scientist’s Experiments in Politics and Motherhood was a 2024 Foreword INDIES winner and Clara Johnson Award finalist. Her work can also be found in Science, Lit Hub, and Orion, among others. She teaches at the Loft Literary Center and in public libraries. She is online at http://www.annafarrohenderson.com