Poems of Power and Our Planet: Six Essential Ecopoetry Collections to Read

At a poetry workshop that I attended some years ago, we were asked to define ecopoetry. Many participants rattled off the usual definitions, such as poems about the environment, ecology, nature, and ecosystems. Some added the destruction of the Earth, global warming, climate change, and the growing concern of our lack of urgency to help the environment.

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Yes, we were aware that “there is no Planet B.” Yet, putting ecopoetry into these neat explanations missed a crucial point about ecopoetry. Ecopoetry goes beyond these standard meanings to include a sense of interconnectedness between humans and the environment and protest against environmental injustices.

Right after Hurricane María battered Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017, I started writing what would eventually form the foundation for my new poetry collection, In Inheritance of Drowning. I turned to ecopoetry to help me wrestle with my experiences as a witness of a powerful hurricane and the suffering of Puerto Rico because it was treated unfairly by the United States as a marginalized community of color.

Ecopoetry, connected to ecojustice and ecocriticsm, offered me the foundation to compose poems that situated environmental racism and protest. This is the kind of ecopoetry that gives a voice to those that have been forced to be silent for so long and connects and reconnects us to ourselves, others, and the Earth. This is the kind of ecopoetry that illuminates our links to history, nature, and critical responses to inequalities.

In Inheritance of Drowning is a poetry collection that builds upon the traditions of ecopoetry and calls for a social transformation, especially as it highlights the intersections of the social, political, and racial injustices and the environment. The books mentioned below also extend the meaning of ecopoetry and encourage readers to think about our attachment to the Earth and environmental justice in meaningful ways.

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Camille T. Dungy (editor), Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry

Camille T. Dungy edits a groundbreaking anthology of ecopoetry by ninety-three African Americans that includes a hundred and eighty poems. The collection expands the meaning of ecopoetry by incorporating poems that examine nature and politics, history, love, violence, animals, protest, and everyday life.

Some of my favorite poets are included, such as Rita Dove, Gwendolyn Brooks, Evie Shockley, Douglas Kearney, Major Jackson, Ross Gay, and Natasha Trethewey. With such a broad range of poets, the anthology ushers in “more voices into the conversation about human interactions with the natural world” and shows how “we must change the parameters of the conversation.”

Heidi Lynn Staples and Amy King (editors), Big Energy Poets: Ecopoetry Thinks Climate Change

This collection is not your typical gloom and doom perspective on the climate crisis. Instead, these ecopoems challenge the hierarchical structures that have harmed the environment and propel readers to find solutions for the dwindling of our natural resources and precarious state of our planet.

Craig Santos Perez and Suzi F. Garcia are some of the notable poets that contribute to the impactful collection with a sense of activism. The moving poems show the power of ecopoetry to transform, inspire, and energize readers.

Craig Santos Perez, from unincorporated territory [åmot]

As the fifth book from the unincorporated territory series, this collection explores Santos Perez’s native Guam, his family, and the ongoing colonialism that has led to many incidents of environmental injustice and degradation in Guam. Santos Perez notes that not all is lost, since there is the potential for healing with “Åmot,” the Chamoru word for medicinal plants.

Here, the land can help us overcome the deep traumas from environmental devastation that is tied to violent oppression and colonialism. By the end of the collection, readers will recognize that ecopoetry is intertwined with activism, healing, politics, history, colonization, and the environment.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive: After the End of the World

This is the second collection of a triptych that breaks so many molds in form, language, and perspectives. Pauline Gumbs ponders the landscape in a post-apocalyptic world, particularly for Black people that face environmental racism and dying capitalism.

In the context of embodying Black feminist theory, the poems point to race, politics, feminism, healing, and the environment. It is a fresh approach to understanding the many nuances of environmentalism.

Juliana Spahr, That Winter the Wolf Came

This is a time when the big bad wolf comes and threatens to not only blow our houses down, but to also harm us with oil-drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, earthquakes, pesticides, and climate change. So, what is a poet to do when humans have some culpability with creating this situation?

Spahr turns to writing how we have to push for the status quo to end in “It’s all Good, it’s all fucked.” It is not only our responsibility to help the environment, according to Spahr, but a part of our shift towards a greater social movement of transforming our environment and ending socio-economic inequality.

If our collective actions stop the global crisis that largely affects the impoverished, then we will be ready to “Hand this over. Pass this on.”

Melissa Tuckey (editor), Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology

Ghost Fishing is a pivotal text of ecopoetry, especially since it is the first anthology to heavily examine ecojustice. The collection is also diverse and boasts contributors from many prolific backgrounds, such as Joy Harjo, Natalie Diaz, Camille T. Dungy, Martín Espada, Danez Smith, and Arthur Sze.

I particularly enjoyed the poems that focused on the environment and migration, food production, environmental disasters, and resistance. All of them “offer us courage to imagine a more just world. In a world out of balance, poetry is an act of cultural resilience.”

By the last poem, readers will reflect upon the connections of social justice and the environment and agree that ecopoetry “is poetry born of deep cultural attachment to the land and poetry born of crisis.”

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In Inheritance of Drowning by Dorsía Silva Smith is available via CavanKerry Press.