An Archive of Suffering: Hunger Stones and the (N)Ec(r)opoetics of Climate Crisis

Even among recent debates about the start of the Anthropocene, and despite the still polarizing political positions on the urgency of climate change, the hunger stones of northern Europe emerge as powerful witnesses to our past and present crises. At once both explicit and enigmatic, hunger stones marry the factual declaration of receding water levels with the elusive voice of past suffering that speaks to present drought conditions, embodying perfectly Ursula K. Le Guin’s assertion that “science explicates; poetry implicates.” The discourse of climate crisis is typically solastalgic; these stones, however, imagine a range of affective and aesthetic registers, most notably in the poetic and artistic warnings to future readers. The elemental media through which the hunger stones speak to the present is the focus of this essay.