Tag Archive for ecopoetry

Announcing “Extra Hidden Life, among the Days” now available in paperback!

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Poetry of grief and sustenance from an award-winning poet

“Just dazzling: how the world, the mind, and emotion are bound into that affecting, meditative, and poignant system of phrases. When I read lines as sharp as these are lexically, semantically, syntactically, and rhythmically, I fall in love with American poetry again.”
—Forrest Gander, New York Journal of Books

Building on her groundbreaking quartet of books about the earth’s elements, Brenda Hillman’s Extra Hidden Life, among the Days features new poems that are both plain and transcendent. This is poetry as a discipline of love and service to the world, whose lines shepherd us through grief and into an ethics of active resistance. A free reader’s companion is available online.

Brenda Hillman is an activist, writer, editor, and teacher. Hillman serves on the faculty of Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California.

April 2, 2019
152 pp., 9 x 6″
Paperback, $14.95 9780819578945
Cloth, $24.95 9780819578051

Announcing “Counter-Desecration” edited by Linda Russo and Marthe Reed

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New vocabulary for a world on the brink

“Affirming the imagination’s importance in effecting change, with marvelous invention this poets’ glossary of terms responsive to the Anthropocene illuminates losses and violations, offers resources, inspires hope.”
—Lynn Keller, author of Recomposing Ecopoetics

Counter-Desecration collects 135 original terms
and definitions articulated by a diverse, international community of poets, including Brenda Hillman, Eileen Tabios, and Christopher Cokinos. The Anthropocene is a term proposed for our present geological epoch during which the role of humanity in the transformation of earth’s environment globally is increasingly perceptible. The terms in this glossary map new perspectives that provide a way to approach the interlinked social, economic, and environmental forces that shape our lives and the world around us.

Linda Russo is the author of three books of poetry, including Participant (Lost Roads Press), winner of
 the Bessmilr Brigham Poets Prize, and To Think of her Writing Awash in Light (Subito Press), a collection of lyrical essays. Her scholarly essays have appeared in Among Friends: Engendering the Social Site of Poetry (University of Iowa Press) and other edited collections. She teaches creative writing and literature at Washington State University.

Marthe Reed was the author of five books, including Nights Reading, (em)bodied bliss, and the collaborative Pleth with j hastain. She was co-publisher and managing editor for Black Radish Books, and her poems have appeared in Jacket2, Tarpaulin Sky, and New American Writing, among other publications.

 

August

144 pp., 5 1⁄2 x 8 1⁄2 ”

Unjacketed cloth, $30.00

978-0-8195-7845-7

 

Paperback, $16.99

978-0-8195-7846-4

 

eBook, $13.99

978-0-8195-7847

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s preface to “Counter-Desecration”

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Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene, edited by Linda Russo and the late Marthe Reed, is a work of collaborative eco-activism and a call to action for readers and writers.

 

Contributors (including Brenda Hillman, Eileen Tabios, Hoa Nguyen, Jennifer Scappettone, Cheryl Savageau, Rusty Morrison, Bhanu Kapil, Christopher Cokinos, etc.) call on humanity to end this era of environmental and spiritual destruction, beginning with this clear and provoking preface by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke.

This glossary delivers terminological impression of shifts in language and in consciousness fostered to address the perilous state of today. Continually fed now since Euro-invasion, intentional attempts at extinction/slaughter of the Western Hemisphere’s indigenous peoples (estimates say that 75 to more than 100 million people rapidly perished at the hands of the Euro-invader and his diseases) undoubtedly spurred the initial methane surge of the Anthropocene. This is, immediate and dire, an enduring era of environmental injustice, survivance under unequal protection from colonial, imperial resourcing, with political sabotage by collective lessening of efforts to combat climate change. Now, in the Sixth Extinction epoch segment, we strive to locate lingual succinctness in attending to the multitudinous expression with participatory means to discern and disseminate information necessary to better the state of the world for all peoples and all lives dependent on our shared planet. Moreover, we strive to employ as vernacular this nomenclature and vocabulary in idiolect of intentional lexicon while gathering activist effort for gross intervention, reclamation, renewal, revivance, and restoration, by whatever means necessary to keep this world inhabitable and whole beyond what damage has already diminished its complete viability.

In imagining a book that would clarify the new ways that we respond to the call our earth, her oceans, and the surrounding atmosphere surely sing, Counter-Desecration brings sustenance and power with terms made in collective remedying. From dysoptics to echolocution, reciproesis to terrotic, the countenance of communication encounters the need of a global population on its mettle. Torpor (the rest state required of an activist) and vivitocracy (a social mind-set built on the idea that all life deserves equally to exist) bring a sense that our collective strength and support of the planet might still replenish and recover her ability to continue, and thus we along with her, or at least give a sense of the hope for future life here. This book allows us fortitude and wisdom to secure what means we might to continue to cherish and to equip us to protect our planet with concise and meritorious language and action: a generous undertaking for which I am exceptionally grateful and believe indispensable for writers, speakers, readers, and researchers working for vital cause and solution.

—Allison Adelle Hedge Coke