“The hydrology of large river systems—their systems of tribu¬taries, canals, locks, and dams linking separate watersheds—has played a major role in sustaining communities and vast networks of commercial relations,” argue Della Marco and Lübken and their re-assessment of the role that rivers can play in American Studies (2021, 15). This talk takes up this re-assessment and looks at some of the function of rivers in contemporary US American and Canadian literatures as a literary trope, device, and forum of political critique and, as part of that critique, of negotiating relations between (human and more-than-human) social entitites and life worlds.