The Ecopoetry Anthology is the authoritative book of contemporary American poetry about nature and the environment. Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street, the editors of the daring first volume, have reunited to create Attached to the Living World. The second anthology explores the issues and conversations in ecopoetry over the past decade and features more than 150 established and emerging poets, including Mildred Barya, Nickole Brown, Simmons Buntin, Lauren Camp, Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Vievee Francis, CMarie Fuhrman, Ross Gay, Erin Hollowell, Marie Howe, Petra Kuppers, J. Drew Lanham, Ada Limόn, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, January Gill O'Neil, Catherine Pierce, Tracy K. Smith, Brian Teare, and Natasha Tretheway. With a foreword by Camille Dungy and an introduction by Margaret Ronda, the poems gathered here provide vital visions to nurture our imaginations and spur us to act.

The anthology delves into the multifaceted ecological crises of our time, highlighting the toxic aftermath of industrial progress and the inequities of environmental racism. It underscores the stark realities faced by communities at the frontline of climate change, emphasizing the overlaps of land degradation and social injustice. Despite themes of loss and devastation, the work is imbued with a current of hope, showcasing poetry's ability to inspire a reconnection with the natural world. It also amplifies the voices of indigenous poets, offering invaluable perspectives on land stewardship and cultural resilience in the face of ongoing colonial impacts. These contributions speak to the essential role of native knowledge and practices in habitat preservation and cultural survival.

Taken as a whole, the anthology emerges as a powerful call to action, urging collective reflection on our carbon footprint and a shared commitment to sustainable futures. It stands as a profound exploration of the intersections of ecological awareness, social justice, and poetic expression, inviting readers to contemplate their place in the broader web of life.

Definitive and daring, The Ecopoetry Anthology is the authoritative collection of contemporary American poetry about nature and the environment--in all its glory and challenge. From praise to lament, the work covers the range of human response to an increasingly complex and often disturbing natural world and inquires of our human place in a vastness beyond the human.

To establish the antecedents of today's writing, The Ecopoetry Anthology presents a historical section that includes poetry written from roughly the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Iconic American poets like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are followed by more modern poets like Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and even more recent foundational work by poets like Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hayden, and Muriel Rukeyser. With subtle discernment, the editors portray our country's rich heritage and dramatic range of writing about the natural world around us.

In this extraordinary collection, Ann Fisher-Wirth looks levelly at mortality, grief, and memory, and reckons with what it is to be urgently alive, bringing her incisive nuance to subjects ranging from the loss of a beloved sister to Mississippi's Parchman Penitentiary to our imperiled natural world to the comforts of marital love. In Wooden Comb, Fisher-Wirth writes, I cannot reconcile how the world is sweet, how the world is burning. Paradise Is Jagged is too wise a book to promise impossible reconciliation. Instead it offers a benediction of sorts: Walk with me through this difficult and tender place, it says. Willingly, gratefully, we do.

-Catherine Pierce, Danger Days, 2021-2025 Mississippi Poet Laureate

Nature writers know that to be fully human is to be engaged with our natural surroundings. Elemental South is a gathering of works by some of the region's best nature writers--people who can coax from words the mysteries of our place in the landscape and the human relationship to wildness.

Arranged by theme according to the basic elements by which many cultures on earth interpret--earth, air, fire, water--the writings consider our actual and assumed connections in the greater scheme of functioning ecosystems. As we read of bears, ancient magnolias, swallow-tail kites, the serenity of a country childhood, the pleasure of eating real food, the remarkable provenance of ancient pottery shards, and much more, these works lure us deep into the southern landscape, away from the constructs of humanity and closer to a recognition of our inextricable ties to the earth.

The writers are all participants in the Southern Nature Project, an ongoing endeavor founded on the conviction that writing like the kind gathered here can help us to lead more human, profound, and courageous lives in terms of how we use our earth. Some of the featured writers are originally from the South, and others migrated here--but all have honed their voices on the region's distinctive landscapes.

Like sunlight stroking the birds' throats so it comes out as song, Ann Fisher-Wirth's graceful and sturdy lines unsettle the seemingly familiar. A writer of moral gravity, her distilled attentiveness presses against our all-too-common ambivalence and detachment from the ordinary world. Whether set in Mississippi, California, the Ozarks, or France, the poems in The Bones of Winter Birdsexhibit an abundance of compassion and civility. As Fisher-Wirth praises, laments, lets go, language salvages what might otherwise be missed. It's with attentiveness and emotional poise that these poems lay everything bare. Despite fear and everyday darkness, I think we are provided for she reminds us, a consolation for which I am grateful. This is a beautiful book.

--Shara Lessley

A vivid, strange, and beautiful account of a year in Sweden, this poem represents the ways in which wildness and monstrousness, dream and terror, coexist forever with constructions of order. Inspired by a medieval map of the same name, the poem weaves the gloom of the author's forgotten past with the pain and pleasures of her present life, creating a treatise on motherhood, marriage, love, forgiveness, reconnection, and abandonment.

A compilation of poetry of great beauty and searing honesty, this book consists of two long experimental sequences: the title poem Dream Cabinet, set on an island in Sweden, and an eloquent account of the poet's first marriage entitled Answers I Did Not Give to the Annulment Questionnaire. Exploring the full cycle of human life, this collection responds to compelling personal, political, and environmental issues of modern times while remaining aware of the evanescence of all mortal experience.