By Kamala Platt. De Gruyter, 2023.

Environmental Justice Poetics: Cultural Representations of Environmental Racism From Chicanas and Women in India is a book that compels scholars, activists, artists and planetary citizens of all ilk to reconsider their relationships with earth and each other. More regenerative than groundbreaking, this study of expressive work by Mexican American and South Asian women engaged at the nexus of ecology and justice imparts a route toward a calm climate in an equitable world.

While offering a critique of patriarchal structures across political spectrums, the book seeks to explore environmental justice cultural poetics, expressive work from novels to murals to activist poetry and performance that is “transnational, trans-community sharing and [offers] multiple border crossings.” In this spirit, Environmental Justice Poetics… examines oppositional consciousness in India and “Greater Mexico,” and in doing so, challenges narrow definitions of environmentalism and foregrounds the complexities of social disenfranchisement and displacement. The women’s cultural poesis under study raise important questions about environmental racism – about who, what and where is protected and who, what and where is neglected or worse. In so doing, imperative shifts in direction and possibilities for transformative change emerge.

Kamala Platt currently teaches creative writing, ethnic literatures, and environmental justice poetics (online) for the School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies in Arizona State University’s New College. She is currently tending native landscape and garden and several animals in her neighborhood on San Antonio’s Westside. She continues ecojustice public scholarship, creative work and community service, and keeps in touch with the Meadowlark Center and family in Kansas—post pandemic zoom and other internet connections facilitate continued learning and maintaining connections. Her poetry collections — Gravity Prevails (FlowerSong Press, 2022), Weedslovers: Ten Years in the Shadow of September (Finishing Line Press, 2014) and On the Line (Wings Press, 2010)— document and exemplify a poetics of crisis and of resistance by chronicling calamities and the persistence of hopeful acts in marginalized parts of our region and planet. She strives to cultivate ecological and cultural reciprocity at her Westside San Antonio home and Garden of Good Trouble and to maintain response-ability as a planetary citizen.