Harvey. Maria. Irma. Sandy. Katrina. We reside in a time of unparalleled hurricanes and catastrophic climate events, a time when it’s increasingly apparent that climate modification is neither thought nor distant―and that rising seas are transforming the coastline of the United States in irrevocable ways.

With this highly original function of lyrical reportage, Elizabeth Rush manuals readers through some of the locations where this change continues to be most dramatic, in the Gulf Coast to Miami, and from New York about Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore City towards the Bay Area. For many from the plant life, animals, and humans in these places, the options are stark: retreat or perish set up. Weaving firsthand accounts from those facing this choice―a Staten Islander who dropped her father during Sandy, the remaining holdouts of a Local American community on a drowning Isle de Jean Charles, a community in Pensacola settled by escaped slaves more than 100 years ago―with profiles of animals biologists, activists, and various other members from the areas both currently in danger and already displaced, Rising privileges the voices of those usually kept at the margins.

Simultaneously polyphonic and precise, Growing is a shimmering yoga on vulnerability and on vulnerable communities, both individual and more than human being, and on how to forget about the areas we love.