Three and a half stars, rounding up to four. Most of those stars are for the experience of separation and change, and my appreciation for the ideas and the effects rather than the emotion, I think. Which is not to say that this isn't an emotive text, but it's a text so concerned with the loss of Miami to climate change and sea level rise, a text so interwoven with the existence and experience of that city, that it's hard for me to appreciate the slow ongoing loss in the same way the author does. I live on the other side of the world; if a text like this were to centre itself around one of the cities that I love, no doubt I'd be more affected. Which is an utterly biased reaction, I know, but we love the things that we love, and it's hard to love something that you've never experienced yourself. I daresay if I'd ever lived in Miami, if I'd ever even visited it, I'd find its loss easier to picture. As it is, I have an intellectual appreciation of what's likely to happen there, but it's not a happening that hits me in the guts, as it were. That, of course, is one of the great problems of climate change: convincing people that they should care about the effects they can't see, occurring to people they don't know and in places far from them.

It's a fantastic idea for a book though - almost a mourning of future events, and a catalogue of coming change. And because the author's experience of Miami is so tied-up in language, the bilingual approach taken here is a really interesting one. There are translations at the back for readers like me, who are unfamiliar with Spanish, but the poems are an ever-changing mix of two languages, and my reading experience included having to flip back and forth between text and translation. That's dislocating, but it's dislocating in a very specific way, one which underlines the tension between what-is and what-will-be-(lost). It's a really effective use of language, I think. And that comment above, about the problem of empathy? I don't know if it's intended, but that effect of dislocation is so present for non-Spanish speaking readers, for non-Miami dwellers, that it's a sharp little stab reminding of the ethics of empathy, and how those same readers should make the effort to empathise more fully.