AGROTOPIAS: AN AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY OF SUSTAINABILITY
By Abby Goode. The University of North Carolina Press, 2022.
In Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability, Abby L. Goode reveals the foundations of American environmentalism and the enduring partnership between racism, eugenics, and agrarian ideals in the United States. Throughout the nineteenth century, writers as diverse as Martin Delany, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Walt Whitman worried about unsustainable conditions such as population growth and plantation slavery. In response, they imagined agrotopias—sustainable societies unaffected by the nation’s agricultural and population crises—elsewhere. Though seemingly ...
AUTOBLIVION
By Trey Moody. Conduit Books, 2023.
AUTOBLIVION traces the difficulties of raising a young child in the Anthropocene. Haunted by the looming inevitability of environmental collapse, the poems invoke traditional storytelling genres to look ahead into the unknown. While also exploring various forms of loss, the collection ultimately serves as a love letter to a daughter’s childhood, an act of preservation for now and of preparation for an opaque future.
Trey Moody was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. The author of Autoblivion (Conduit ...
HEAVEN UNDERFOOT
By Diana Woodcock. Codhill Press, 2023.
The speaker of the poems in Heaven Underfoot –by immersing herself in the more than human world of several diverse biomes, from the Arabian Desert to the Everglades, Southern Africa, the Arctic Circle, Great Smoky Mountains, and the Tongass National Forest– has endeavored to make the non-human environment central rather than marginal as she explores and celebrates the sacred within and on this earth.
The poems in Heaven Underfoot qualify as ecopoetry as they exemplify the four features of ...
NOTES FROM A MARINE BIOLOGIST’S DAUGHTER
By Anne McCrary Sullivan. Saint Julian Press, 2023.
The poems of Notes from a Marine Biologist’s Daughter honor a mother’s ways of learning, seeing, and being in relation with the world. Some of the poems are explicitly about the mother while others embody forms of attention and perception that are the mother’s living legacy. This work is grounded in close observation of the natural world, often the world of the Everglades and its mangrove wilderness. It is rich in botanical detail and knowledge of ...