This essay examines the possibility of recuperating resilience for a more radical climate politics through a reading of Juliana Spahr’s extended autofictional prose poem The Transformation (2007) and Kim Stanley Robinson’s acclaimed cli-fi novel The Ministry for the Future (2020). Both texts respond to global warming by recoiling from our present path toward disaster, but they do so in aesthetically as well as ideologically very different ways. I argue that while the experimental form of Spahr’s narrative mimics the entanglements of socio-ecological life, Robinson’s novel gives prevalence to historical-political imagination for remaking the future. While both texts are what Susie O’Brien calls “resilience stories” in their reimagining of environmental futurities, Spahr’s narrative performs resilience through its nonlinear form, whereas Robinson’s novel shapes events into a blueprint for a more resilient climate future. Drawing on the distinction in model studies between models as representations of something already existing and models as designs for realizing something as yet nonexistent, I thus read Spahr’s narrative as a model of resilience and Robinson’s novel as a model for resilience. As such, they each provide a different model for thinking and acting in response to anthropogenic climate change.