Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field (Contemp North American Poetry)
Description
Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field makes a formidable intervention into the emerging field of ecopoetics. The volume’s essays model new and provocative methods for reading twentieth and twenty-first century ecological poetry and poetics, drawing on the insights of ecocriticism, contemporary philosophy, gender and sexuality studies, black studies, Native studies, critical race theory, and disability studies, among others.
Contributors offer readings of a diverse range of poets, few of whom have previously been read as nature writers—from midcentury Beat poet Michael McClure, Objectivist poet George Oppen, and African American poets Melvin Tolson and Robert Hayden; to contemporary writers such as Diné poet Sherwin Bitsui, hybrid/ collage poets Claudia Rankine and Evelyn Reilly, emerging QPOC poet Xandria Phillips, and members of the Olimpias disability culture artists’ collective. While addressing preconceptions about the categories of nature writing and ecopoetics, contributors explore, challenge, and reimagine concepts that have been central to environmental discourse, from apocalypse and embodiment to toxicity and sustainability.
This collection of essays makes the compelling argument that ecopoetics should be read as “coextensive with post-1945 poetry and poetics,” rather than as a subgenre or movement within it. It is essential reading for any student or scholar working on contemporary literature or in the environmental humanities today.
Contributors: Joshua Bennett, Rob Halpern, Matt Hooley, Angela Hume, Lynn Keller, Petra Kuppers, Michelle Niemann, Gillian Osborne, Samia Rahimtoola, Joan Retallack, Joshua Schuster, Jonathan Skinner.
Praise for Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field (Contemp North American Poetry)
“This innovative volume showcases a capacious range of critical approaches to the diverse forms, social practices, and political imaginaries of contemporary ecologically oriented poetics. Drawing poetry and environmental theory into compelling new configurations, Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field offers an essential field guide to ecopoetics in a calamitous era.”—Margaret Ronda, University of California–Davis
“These incisive essays offer persuasive arguments for the relevance of diverse poetry to the actualities of ecological damage. They demonstrate how many contemporary poets, whether writing about green stuff, cities, selves, or language, take a critical stand alongside environmental scientists and campaigners, offering vital resources for our altering world.”—Peter Middleton, University of Southampton
This sharply conceived volume is a hive of essays by alert pollinators, buzzing around ecopoetics with fierce determination to rise above casual assumptions about its potential and its applicability. Their deft appraisals are instructive, witty, and bound to provoke serious reconsideration of all that’s at stake in poetry.”—Jed Rasula, University of Georgia
