8 Beautiful Books of Queer Science & Nature Writing

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve recommend this book by now — if you haven’t read it yet, you’re in for a treat! In each essay, Imbler writes with curiosity and compassion about a different sea creature, from goldfish and Chinese sturgeons to immortal jellyfish and the organisms that make their homes around hydrothermal vents. Woven into these meditations on sea life are reflections on queerness, trans and mixed-race identity, sexual violence, queer community spaces, cultural heritage, and more. It’s a gorgeous, creative, and delightfully unpredictable book.

The ocean is just decidedly, queer, okay? This is another wonderful nonfiction book that blends studies of marine creatures with explorations of very human concerns. Gumbs approaches the ocean and its inhabitants with a Black, queer, feminist lens. She’s interested in what ocean dwellers have to teach us about social justice movements, community care, and liberation. And Gumbs is a poet, which makes her prose an absolute pleasure to read.

This is one of my favorite books of nature writing from the last few years. It has everything I love about genre-bending nonfiction. It’s an extended essay about a summer Sloan spent in Homer, Alaska, and her experiences and observations as one of only a few Black people living there. She writes about wilderness, the history of Black nature writing, photography, loneliness, queerness, beauty, and so much more. It’s meditative and smart and devastating and funny.

Kazim Ali, the child of South Asian immigrants, spent a formative period of his childhood in Jenpeg, a small town built for one purpose: to build a hydroelectric dam. His family moved there when his father got a job working on the dam; as a child, he had no idea that the town was built on land belonging to the local Pimicikamak community, or how much harm the dam caused. As an adult, seeking to better understand the history he was a part of, he returns home, to visit with and listen to Pimicikamak elders and community leaders. This is a beautiful book about environmental degradation, hidden stories, the violence of erasure, and what it means to be shaped by places with complex and sometimes contradictory histories.

When he learned he was HIV positive in 1986, filmmaker and artist Derek Jarman decided to make a garden at his cottage on the English coast. In these journals, which he kept throughout the late 1980s, he writes on the garden and its changing seasons, as well as his life and art. He seamlessly weaves together observations about plants and the natural world with reflections on his childhood, art-making process, film career, and life as a gay man living with HIV.

This is one of my favorite books of all time. It reshaped the way I think about queerness, community, disability, landscape, nature, and home, and it’s one I’ll go on recommending for the rest of my life. In a blend of memoir, disability and queer theory, nature writing, and social critique, Eli Clare examines the ways in which queerness, disability, trauma, and geography (among many other factors) have shaped his life. His prose is accessible, intimate, and poetic; his ideas are far-reaching and world-opening.

This is not a book about “pure” nature, and it also doesn’t have anything to do with queerness. But guess what? Queer authors can write about whatever they want, and farms are absolutely a part of nature. This book is about sheep farming, the wool industry, crafting, and how yarn gets made. Over the course of a year, Parkes charts the process of transforming a bale of fleece into yarn. Along the way, she visits sheep farms, wool mills, craft spinneries, dye houses, and more. It’s charming, informative, and surprisingly fascinating!

In this academic text, Andil Gosine explores queerness and queer desire in the Caribbean, examining the ways it has been shaped by colonial understandings of nature and animality. Through in-depth studies of traditional queer and Caribbean cultural practices, as well as current and historical liberation movements, he pushes back against the binary divides between humans, animals, and nature that often posit queerness as “unnatural.”