Christopher Cokinos is the author or coeditor of several books, including Still as Bright: An Illuminating History of the Moon, from Antiquity to Tomorrow, The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds, and Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight. He is the winner of awards and fellowships from, among others, New American Press, the Whiting Foundation, the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, and the National Science Foundation. His poems, articles, and essays have appeared in such venues as Scientific American, High Country News, Astronomy, Orion, Discover.com, and the Los Angeles Times.
Christopher Cokinos
Feature
The Incredible Strangeness of a Total Solar Eclipse
A PARTIAL SOLAR ECLIPSE is to a total eclipse what a garden drizzle is to a mountain storm: light rain and pleasant greenery versus stacked, black thunderheads belching lightning, thunder, and Continue reading
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You See It All the Time, but How Much Do You Know about the Moon?
True or false? Infamously, Carl Sagan once called the Moon “boring.” True. Boy, was he wrong. As you will find out, if you read on. Does the Moon have a Continue reading
Review
Two Books on Geoengineering Climate
YOU’VE HEARD plenty of bad news on the climate lately. And there’s more to come. Might geoengineering be good news? Geoengineering is the term for the deliberate intervention into climate processes Continue reading
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Instead of Suns, the Earth
IN HIS ACERBIC COLLECTION of essays, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World, writer and critic Thomas Disch says that “there can be no question Continue reading
Review
The Windup Girl
READERS OF NATURE WRITING may not be aware of the deep green streak that runs through much science fiction, so Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl might be missed. It shouldn’t be. Continue reading
Review
Under a Green Sky
Paleontologist Peter Ward’s book on mass extinctions and climate change provides a deep-time perspective that is both sobering and necessary. Under a Green Sky puts the present within a geological context Continue reading
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The Consolations of Extinction
SNOW IN THE SUMMER ISN’T UNHEARD OF in Utah’s Cache Valley, where I live. Last year, after a warm spell, I was suddenly back in my parka — a puffy, crazed Continue reading