Description: Poetry from Spaceship Earth retrieves a diverse array of postwar American poets--Robert Duncan, June Jordan, Joanne Kyger, Lorine Niedecker, and Charles Olson--who contested and cultivated alternatives to this emergent mode of environmentalism. By placing the major innovations of postwar poetry into conversation with environmental politics, Cold War science and technology studies, and postcolonial and Black studies, Samia Rahimtoola develops an original theoretical and historical account of the racial and colonial logics that underpin the supposedly neutral project of managing nature.
Brief description: Samia Rahimtoola is assistant professor of English at Bowdoin College. She is author of the creative work Revelation Desert Flow, and her writing has appeared in Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Post45: Contemporaries, and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, among others. She lives in Brunswick, Maine.
Review Quotes: "A vitally important piece of ecocritical scholarship and a significant contribution to studies of American poetics . . . Poetry from Spaceship Earth offers an important new decolonial critique of these modes of technocratic environmentalism, emerging both from postcolonial criticism and discourses of environmental justice and from the thinking of an array of poets whose work negotiates and imagines beyond technocratic modes of environmental management."--Margaret Ronda, author, Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End