Abstract
This essay interprets the project of Tom Comitta's experimental novel The Nature Book as a response to the crisis of the metabolic rift. Defined by John Bellamy Foster and others as a rupture in environmental circuits of renewal and repair, the metabolic rift provides one way to describe human alienation from the natural world. Comitta's novel seeks recuperation from this injury through a deep immersion into nonhuman perspectives. The novel consists of a collage of passages focusing on nonhuman agents; the passages were clipped from three hundred well-known novels. By arranging these snippets in a dreamlike flow that travels across landscapes and seasons, Comitta builds up a remarkable literary experience and new readerly relation to the natural world.