Description
Poetry. Environmental Studies. We draw sustenance and identity from our landscapes. What presences are we in this biome—what are we amidst and among? Seeking an answer, Linda Russo sets her feet down in and around the Palouse, a region known for vast undulating wheat fields. Poetic inquiries—seeing with the "worn-out angry eyes" of the last Columbia River Pygmy rabbit, sonic countermapping, re-imagining histories and geographies, writing on-site with squirrels and terns and flickers—are combined to closely read space as, in the words of cultural landscape historian J.B. Jackson, a "field of perpetual conflict." The result is a document that helps rescale our thinking about 21st century inhabitance.
Testing "the analytic capacity of sentient poetry," Russo encourages us to live simultaneously lightly, and with deeper roots. This is exactly what I'd hoped the meeting of poetry and ecology would give us."—Stephen Collis
Author Bio
Linda Russo [inhabitorypoetics.blogspot.com] lives and writes mostly in the inland northwestern US within walking distance from her back door. She is the author of three books of poetry: MIRTH (Chax Press, 2006), MEANING TO GO TO THE ORIGIN IN SOME WAY (Shearsman Books, 2015) and PARTICIPANT (Lost Roads Press, 2016), winner of the Bessmilr Brigham Poets Prize. TO THINK OF HER WRITING AS AWASH IN LIGHT, a collection of hybrid-lyric essay exploring literary material geographies, was selected by John D'Agata as winner of the Subito Press Lyric Essay Prize. Her poems have appeared in the anthology Make It True: Poetry from Cascadia, and in magazines such as Interim, Journal of Poetics Research, Omniverse, and Tears in the Fence. Scholarly essays have appeared in Among Friends: Engendering the Social Site of Poetry (University of Iowa Press) and other edited collections, and as the preface of Joanne Kyger's ABOUT NOW: COLLECTED POEMS (National Poetry Foundation).
Author City: PULLMAN, WA USA