As befits a literary effort, the writing strives for beauty: A persimmon from Isle de Jean Charles becomes a “shiny globe,” “full of sun and the little freshwater that still snakes its way along the island’s stubborn spine.” Rush captures nature with precise words that almost amount to poetry; the book is further enriched with illuminating detail from the lives of those people inhabiting today’s coasts.

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But language raises as many questions as it answers in the case of this crisis. What distinguishes a refugee from a migrant from an exile? When does retreat become flight? What is wisdom versus recalcitrance, and who determines what makes a happy home? The American language seems to lack the words to adequately capture this creeping calamity, the words that will help Americans comprehend the future, accept the fact that the waters will rise and continue to rise for decades and centuries thanks both to melting glaciers and to the physical expansion of warmer waters. The last time carbon dioxide made up this proportion of the air, the rock record suggests sea levels were 100 feet higher. By 2100, the seas could rise anywhere between five inches and 10 feet, or more, depending on what we do and whom you trust to make that forecast. How profound our ignorance has been, how relatively new our knowledge. This provokes the need for new words, like “endsickness,” a kind of vertigo that Rush and others experience when confronted by weird climate phenomena like warmer waters intruding in the Gulf of Maine.

The dispatches of the subtitle really come straight from the people on the front lines of this drowning, much as Svetlana Alexievich skillfully accomplished in her Nobel Prize-winning reportage. Rush transcribes a range of voices, from a victim of Hurricane Sandy’s harrowing tale of devastating human loss to the plain truths spoken by people like Dan Kipnis, who has already fled Miami Beach: “Their dream is gonna drown.” To me, these are the most intense portions of the book, yet there is no character, not even Rush herself, to guide you through the whole of this story. Nor is there really a plot to follow, not even a chronology that points the way through a series of essays veering from haunting survivors’ tales to poetic musings on science.

It’s an intentional series of vignettes, however, bolstered by deep reporting and a sense of history, reminiscent in part of W. G. Sebald’s works evoking place, even up to including photographs, like the pictures of rampikes that mark various chapters. It’s often a treat to figure out where Rush is going with any particular story, “to discover the direction of your own thinking in the course of mining the past,” as she writes. “The conclusion arrived at not in advance but through the process, by unearthing whatever is buried in the strata.” There are also few solutions on offer beyond what she calls the “radically egalitarian” nature of “organized retreat” — the water will affect us all, and getting out of its way demands a collective response.