Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology
Edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street
Terra Firma Books / Trinity University Press
2025 | 270 pages
One can argue that most poetry is ecopoetry, weaving emotion and insight with physical surroundings. Think of Emily Dickinson’s “The Snow” or Rilke’s Duino Elegies, where the weather or the setting play major metaphorical roles in the poems. In Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street, however, the environment, both animate and inanimate, is seen as both acting and acted upon, threatened and threatening. Fisher-Wirth and Street edited The Ecopoetry Anthology in 2013, and this new volume includes poets who were not featured in the original anthology. This new collection’s unique look at the last decade’s English-language poetry of the Anthropocene—our current geological age when human activity has been the dominant influence—provides us with the work of 61 poets, showcasing a variety of poems in a wide number of forms. There is, in short, something for everyone.
These poems define “ecosystem” to include not just the natural world but the human-designed systems such as racism and oppression, which so often accompany environmental degradation. For instance, Sean Hill’s “The White Headed Woodpecker” describes the eponymous bird in its home environment of Roslyn, Washington in the Cascade range. Hill entwines the bird’s habits and details with the town’s history, in which unknowing Black miners were enticed to move in 1888 to break a strike of immigrant, white miners against white owners:
… With their hammering and drilling to extract
a living, woodpeckers could be considered arboreal miners.
In 1888, those miners from many lands all in Roslyn came
together to go on strike against the mine management.
And so, from southern states, a few hundred Black miners
were recruited with the promise of opportunities in Roslyn,
[…]
unwitting scabs—that healing that happens
after lacerations or abrasions. Things settled down as they do
sometimes and eventually Blacks and whites entered a union
as equals. Black save for a white face and crown and a sliver
of white on its wings,
[…]
Males have a patch of red feathers
on the back of their crowns, and I can’t help but see blood.
The mingling of Black and white, home and habitat, and the “union of equals” rendered uneasy with the observation that “I can’t help but see blood” heightens the tension and leaves us wondering how long this union will last, how long the beautiful woodpecker will survive.
While this poem and many others are deeply rooted in a U.S. location, others are translated from foreign languages and places. For instance, Gisela Heffes’s “An Epistemology of Floriculture” (translated by Adele Lonas) interposes the beauty and supposed romance of flowers with the reality of commercial flower farms in Colombia:
I received roses today.
Roses from the savanna of Bogota
I don’t like roses.
Much less from Colombia.
The flowers in Colombia are sprayed with pesticides.
The women who work in the floriculture industry are exposed to the pesticides.
The women who work in the floriculture industry cannot procreate.
Like most of the poems in this collection, this work operates on multiple levels. The speaker clearly received roses from someone who didn’t know her well, someone who thought they could impress or woo her with flowers that render other women infertile, that kill even as they themselves are harvested.
It is this multi-dimensionality that makes the collection work. It would be too easy to merely despair. The population of Roslyn has come to its fragile resolution, although there’s still an undercurrent of blood. One assumes the giver of roses gets no further in the courtship, although perhaps there’s hope for learning.
One of the most beautiful and saddest poems—although most are tinged with sadness—is Sophie Klahr’s “Tender”:
I spent late morning weeping with the news:
a black bear with burnt paws is euthanized
along the latest wildfire’s newest edge.
It was crawling on its forearms, seeking
a place to rest.
This collection strikes the reader differently from a volume of poetry by a single author. There is no organic arc that carries us to an epiphany or resolution. Instead, the poems are arranged alphabetically by author, each providing a different perspective on our modern world. We end up with a mosaic of heart-breaking, illuminating moments.
The power of these works brings up new questions. Might topics and tone have changed over time or with the poet’s location? This reader has been inspired to dig deeper to see what changes might have arisen as the impacts of the Anthropocene become more obvious.
This book is must-reading for all of us living in this world. It will be of particular interest to those who want to understand the current creative response to the Anthropocene and to researchers or students in higher education. I can envision an instructor assigning occasional readings as examples of reactions to the land desecration (Julia Spicher Kasdorf’s “A Mother Near the West Virginia Line Considers the Public Health”) or the consideration of threatened species (John Shoptaw’s “Pangolin Scales,” formatted in the curved shape of its subject).
Each piece is heart-breaking in its own way. In her long poem, Kasdorf chronicles the environmental degradation caused by fracking, starting with the narrator’s concern for her family:
The industry thinks I’m too dumb to back down; they don’t know
I do this for my mom and dad. They were sixty-nine and seventy-one.
[…]
We sealed the house,
set up an air scrubber, but—four of their neighbors passed last year too.
We bought the coal rights to our 115 acres because we know
the company will come up to your front door, but we let the gas rights go,
just didn’t see this coming. […]
They put in four shallow wells and a Marcellus well on a five-acre pad seven hundred feet
from our porch. The workers come in by the busload. All those strangers…
The impacts extend beyond her family to her neighbors:
I look at pictures of my little one from that time, and he has the same dark circles
under his eyes as the Hallowich kids. He’d get terrible stomach pains, nothing
we could do but hold him. My older boy had the nosebleeds and rashes.
I couldn’t keep him inside all the time. I’ll show you pictures. […]
And the health effects extend farther into the natural world, to strangers:
“Alternative waste disposal on site” means they can bury radioactive
drill cuttings in your land. When they drained the frack pits,
They shook the tarp and bulldozed the sludge into the ground, too.
There’s places we mow now, but we don’t feed that hay to our horses.
[…]
The stock sale registers animals now, so if I sell hay to a neighbor,
he sells his steer, and someone’s sick from the meat, that comes back on me.
And into the next generation:
We saw clouds of silica sand blow off train cars over the little league field,
and someone was holding a newborn there with us in the stands.
The narrator concludes with how the eponymous mother and her son have become activists:
… when you find out what they did to your land,
you’re just sick. Let them think I’m too dumb to back down. My son
won’t play on any T-ball team with industry logos on their shirts.
The reader wonders if these changes can occur in time; whether we can wake up in time to save our beautiful planet, and ourselves.
Ranging as it does over the past decade and across topic and region, Attached to the Living World adds an important element to our understanding of creativity in an era when not just the topics of the poems but their creators are under threat. It brings home the responsibilities we bear in our positions as, in President Obama’s words, “the first generation to feel the impact of climate change, and the last generation that can do something about it.” The first thing we need to do is memorialize what we are losing, as this volume does in masterful fashion. Then we need to do something.
Ann Leamon’s writing ranges from book reviews and poetry to textbooks about venture capital. Her work has been published by J. Wiley, the Harvard Business Press, the Harvard Review, The Arts Fuse, Tupelo Quarterly, MicroLit Almanac, North Dakota Quarterly, and River Teeth, among others. She holds a BA (Honors) in German from Dalhousie University/University of King’s College, an MA in Economics from the University of Montana, and an MFA in Poetry from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives on the coast of Maine with her husband and their dog, a Corgi-Lab mix.
Header photo by Stephen Moehle, courtesy Shutterstock.
