Sensoria: Attending to the Wonder and Vitality of Nature
Sensoria: Attending to the Wonder and Vitality of Nature
editors, Bruce Jennings & Gavin Van Horn
poetry editor, Heather Swan
From the mating calls of chorus frogs to insect olfaction to elephant funerary rites to the memory-rich tastes of place, Sensoria offers an immersion in the sensual experiences of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling—and their interactions, combinations, and more-than-human manifestations.
This shimmering volume of sensation from Humans & Nature Press proposes possibilities and practices to heighten and expand readers’ empathic imaginations and sensory awareness of the natural world through everyday experiences with nature.
Humans, along with all other creatures, are an entanglement of sensual relations, shaping and shaped by our somatic engagement with the world. The essays and poetry of Sensoria transport readers into compelling stories and ethical reflections that stretch the limits of the moral imagination, calling attention to the wondrous ways in which humans and other-than-human beings experience and perceive the world, not just through the senses but within them.
By exploring the sensorium among all forms of life endowed with different kinds of consciousness and communicative abilities, this volume highlights ecologically and socially diverse ways of touching the world with mind, and touching mind with the world.
Contributors:
Sohini Basak, Elizabeth Bradfield, Nickole Brown, Rebecca R. Burrill, Lauren Camp, Brenda Cárdenas, Lars Chittka, Kai Coggin, Brittney Corrigan, James Crews, Camille T. Dungy, Alexa Firmenich, CMarie Fuhrman, Ross Gay, Marcus Kes Pih Soh Mekek Grignon, Bill S. Hansson, Rachel Harris, Graham Harvey, John Hausdoerffer, Gordon Hempton, Liam Heneghan, Jane Hirshfield, Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Gregory Hitch, Nick Hunt, Elizabeth Jacobson, Catherine Jagoe, Danusha Laméris, J Drew Lanham, Pacyinz Lyfoung, Joshua Mabie, Kalyanee Mam, Elena Mancioppi, Martin Lee Mueller and Austra Apsīte, Gordon Miller, John MacNeill Miller, Gary Paul Nabhan, Jennifer Oakes, Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell, Carolyn Purnell, David Rothenberg, Laura Sewall, Heather Swan, Nicholas Triolo, Gavin Van Horn, Andreas Weber, Erin Jayne Williams, Orrin Williams, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft
With topics that range from plant communication to bees’ sense of beauty to animism and hedgehogs, this volume offers a sensory feast that includes and goes beyond human perceptions by honoring and attending to nonhuman lifeworlds.
PURCHASE OPTIONS | Sensoria is available worldwide. Readers may order Sensoria at the buttons below, and local bookstores can place orders for Sensoria through our distributor, Ingram. Thank you for supporting our small, independent press.
Elementals Purchasing Options
For detailed purchasing options and for international distributor information, please click here. We will update this page with additional international purchasing options as they become available.
Individual Elementals volumes are also available for purchase. To order individual volumes, search by volume name, i.e. “Elementals: Earth, Vol. 1” on any of the purchasing sites included above.
Individual volumes of Elementals and the five-volume series are also available as e-pubs. Full details are available here.
About the editors:
Bruce Jennings is senior fellow at the Center for Humans & Nature, and developmental editor for Humans & Nature Press Books. He also is adjunct professor at Vanderbilt University in the department of health policy and the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society. He is a former executive vice president and current fellow and senior advisor of the Hastings Center, a nonprofit research center based in Garrison, New York, that studies ethical issues in society, medicine, and the life sciences. He came to Vanderbilt from the Yale University School of Public Health, where he taught ethics from 1996 to 2014. Bruce has written and edited thirty-two books and has published many articles on ethics and social issues.
Gavin Van Horn, PhD, is the executive editor of Humans & Nature Press Books, the author of The Way of Coyote, and the coeditor of City Creatures: Animal Encounters in the Chicago Wilderness, Wildness: Relations of People and Place, the five-volume series Elementals, and the award-winning five-volume series Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations. He currently resides in the ancestral lands of the Northern Chumash people in San Luis Obispo, California, where you can find him wandering the nearby hills and shores, senses awakened by black sage, Anna’s hummingbirds, and ocean funk. More about Gavin and his work can be found at www.storyforager.com.
About the poetry editor:
Heather Swan, PhD, is a poet and nonfiction writer. She is the author of the nonfiction books Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection and Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field (Penn State Press), the latter of which won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. Her poetry collection A Kinship with Ash (Terrapin Books), published in 2020, was a finalist for the ASLE Book Award and longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. A second collection, Dandelion, was published in 2023. She invites students to consider wonder and connection in her environmental humanities classes in Madison, Wisconsin.
Books
Praise for Sensoria
"A collection as diverse and generative as the senses themselves. Rich in experience and insight, these writings awaken and invite. Through vibrant and compelling stories and juxtapositions, we’re called to deeper perception, embodied engagement, and right action grounded in the sensory riches of the living Earth."
— David George Haskell, biologist and two-time Pulitzer-finalist author of How Flowers Made our World, Sounds Wild and Broken, The Songs of Trees, and The Forest Unseen
"This remarkable collection delights, teaches, and astounds, all at once. It is a feast for the ears, a symphony for the mouth, and a bouquet for the soul. I am so glad that it exists; our world is made better because of it."
— Charles Hood, author of Wild LA and Nocturnalia: Nature in the Western Night
"In this one dazzling volume, Bruce, Gavin, and Heather have gathered together a wild chorus of silver-tongued naturalists, Earth wanderers, storytellers, poets, and imagineers, all of them charming us to fall even deeper in love with our endangered yet endlessly spellbinding world. Go ahead, what the hell, take a bite.”
— Bill Plotkin, author of Soulcraft, Nature and the Human Soul, Wild Mind, and The Journey of Soul Initiation
“Sensoria! How we absorb the world. Blue green. Red hot. Buzz and growl. Bitter. Moldy death. Unlike words standing at a distance from their primal essences deep in our bodies, these, in Sensoria flirt and dance with their own awakening selves.”
— Brooke Williams, author of Encountering Dragonfly: Notes on the Practice of Re-enchantment and Mary Jane Wild: Two Walks and a Rant
“Sensoria offers the reader both flight and grounding; through the latest findings and eldest wisdom espousing the joys of realizing our sensory potentials; through personal tales and vivid poetics evoking realities at the borders of our everyday perception. Together the collection makes an urgent and delightful case for us to re-attune, re-commit, and re-constellate our attention and our bodies toward a world with which we have always been intertwined, to discern it anew with fresh eyes, ears, and hearts.”
— Isaac Yuen, author of Utter, Earth: Advice on Living in a More-than-Human World and co-author of The Sound Atlas: A Guide to Strange Sounds Across Landscapes and Imagination
“In this welcome and timely anthology, Sensoria, we are encouraged to contemplate the classic senses, plus an attentiveness to community called “sensing together,” as a critical guide to zoetic entanglement—healthy relationships incorporating self, others, and the planet. The exquisite quality and impressive range of environmental writing from authors well known and new, from writers scholarly, activist, and poetic, serves one purpose skillfully—to invite the reader to the balance needed to interpret and therefore align with the signaling that accompanies being human in a more-than-human world. At its core this anthology is a reminder of our human connection to the planet through our shared sensory experiences, discovering the magic and humility of our role in the web of environmental relationships and realizing the sacred in everything.”
— Claudia J. Ford, Professor of Environment & Sustainability
“In Sensoria, the world comes alive not through abstraction, but through the skin, the breath, and the shimmering edge of perception where human and more-than-human lives meet. This essential anthology invites us to listen more deeply, see more ethically, and feel more fully the entangled vitality of Earth’s creatures and forces. Each essay, each poem, and each accompanying image is a gesture of attention—a leaning in toward the sensory languages that root us in place and call us to care. With lyric precision and intellectual generosity, Sensoria reminds us that to reawaken the senses is to remember our belonging in a world rich with meaning, movement, and mystery. And in so belonging, Sensoria also reminds us of what’s at stake: the need to protect the wild Earth we still have and to live in ways that honor Earth’s fragility, resilience, and wonder.”
– Simmons Buntin, Editor-in-Chief, Terrain.org
"In April 2025, I was driving Washington’s Highway 14 east along the Columbia from Portland when my car began making strange noises. I found a turn-off onto a side-road, rolled down my window, and was enveloped not in car trouble but in the joyous cries of half a million migrating snow geese. I tell this story because my hour with them has been life-changing in much the way Bruce Jennings’ and Gavin Van Horn’s magnificent book, Sensoria, has been life-changing. This collection has reopened my battle-weary heart to more miraculous modes of wonder than I knew existed, and it could not have done so at a more wonder-starved time in our history. They turned a four-square-mile green winter wheat field pure white as tens of thousands more darkened the skies above me with their shadows. I have never been so densely or gratefully surrounded by so many ecstatic creatures, and the same holds true for Sensoria."
– David James Duncan, author of The River Why, The Brothers K, and Sun House
“Synaesthetic by design, Sensoria aims to amplify and transform the senses. By confronting readers with what they’ve maybe forgotten but still not lost—the vast worlds of other ways of knowing—it grants access to new maps of sensing and feeling, to no less than the promise and possibility of being alive.”
– Hugh Raffles, author of The Book of Unconformities
Sensoria Audio
Gordon Hempton’s essay “Listening Is Not What You Think” includes the following audio accompaniment and can be listened to here.
